Dryad Press is an independent literary press based in the Takoma Park, MD and San Francisco, CA.

The press was founded in the November 1967 by Merrill Leffler and Neil Lehrman with the first issue of Dryad. The literary magazine began as a quarterly and then evolved into a more irregular publication.

They began publishing books with Rod Jellema

Rod Jellema

Rod Jellema is an American poet, teacher, and translator.He holds a B.A. from Calvin College and a PhD from the University of Edinburgh ....

's Something Tugging the Line followed by many others, among them, books by James Wright

James Wright (poet)

James Arlington Wright was an American poet.Wright first emerged on the literary scene in 1956 with The Green Wall, a collection of formalist verse that was awarded the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Prize. But by the early 1960s, Wright, increasingly influenced by the Spanish language...

, Roland Flint

Roland Flint

Roland Henry Flint was an American poet and professor of English at Georgetown University.-Life:Born in Park River, North Dakota, he attended the University of North Dakota before joining the United States Marine Corps. He served in post-war Korea and then returned to and graduated from the...

, Myra Sklarew

Myra Sklarew

Myra Sklarew is an American biologist, poet and teacher.-Life:She received a biology degree from Tufts University, in 1956. She studied bacterial genetics and bacterial viruses with Salvador Luria and Max Delbruck at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory...

, Linda Pastan

Linda Pastan

Linda Pastan is an American poet of Jewish background. From 1991–1995 she was Poet Laureate of Maryland. She is known for writing short poems that address topics like family life, domesticity, motherhood, the female experience, aging, death, loss and the fear of loss, as well as the...

, Paul Zimmer, Philip Jason, Roger Aplon, Barbara Lefcowitz

Barbara Lefcowitz

Barbara Lefcowitz is a published poet from Bethesda, Maryland, whose books include Red and White Lies and Photo, Bomb, Red Chair: New Poems....

, Ann Darr

Ann Darr

Ann Darr was an American poet and educator who lived in Washington, D.C.Born in Bagley, Iowa she studied at the University of Iowa before her career as a writer and broadcaster on the NBC Radio program The Women of Tomorrow....

, Rodger Kamenetz

Rodger Kamenetz

Rodger Kamenetz is an American poet and author. He was born in Baltimore and educated at Yale, Stanford and Johns Hopkins University...

, and Herman Taube.

Dryad Press has acquired a reputation as a sterling publisher of good poetry. In 1975 the Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet James Wright

James Wright (poet)

James Arlington Wright was an American poet.Wright first emerged on the literary scene in 1956 with The Green Wall, a collection of formalist verse that was awarded the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Prize. But by the early 1960s, Wright, increasingly influenced by the Spanish language...

 wrote of the importance of Dryad Press as an independent publisher:

"My devotion to Dryad Press and all its works is something more than aesthetic pleasure in the beauty of its design and the excellence of its authors. It is a devotion that might almost be called a sense of relief. I see appearing all around me so many splendid writers; and yet I know that most of them would never appear at all through large commercial publishers. We are coming back where we belong in America in one realm of life, at any rate: the publication of real poetry by small independent presses. Dryad is very beautiful."

In 1976 the press published a book edited by Marguerite Harris, which included poems by Robert Lowell

Robert Lowell

Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was an American poet, considered the founder of the confessional poetry movement. He was appointed the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress where he served from 1947 until 1948...

, William Meredith

William Morris Meredith, Jr.

William Morris Meredith, Jr. was an American poet and educator. He was Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1978 to 1980.-Early years:...

, Peter Davison

Peter Davison

Peter Davison is a British actor, best known for his roles as Tristan Farnon in the television version of James Herriot's All Creatures Great and Small and the fifth incarnation of the Doctor in Doctor Who, which he played from 1982 to 1984.-Early life:Davison was born Peter Moffett in Streatham,...

, David Ignatow

David Ignatow

-Life:David Ignatow was born in Brooklyn on February 7, 1914, and spent most of his life in the New York City area. He died on November 17, 1997, at his home in East Hampton, New York. His papers are held at University of California, San Diego.-Career:...

, Ted Kooser

Ted Kooser

Ted Kooser is an American poet. He served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004 to 2006.-Early Life:...

, William Matthews

William Matthews (poet)

William Matthews was an American poet and essayist.-Life:Raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, Matthews earned a bachelor's degree from Yale University, and a master's from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.In addition to serving as a Writer-in-Residence at Boston's Emerson College, Matthews...

, and Ed Zahniser. In November 2007 the press released Against the Grain: The Literary Life of a Poet, the memoir of Poet Laureate Reed Whittemore

Reed Whittemore

Edward Reed Whittemore, Jr. is an American poet, biographer, critic, literary journalist and college professor. He was appointed the sixteenth and later the twenty-eighth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1964, and in 1984.-Biography:Born in New Haven, Connecticut,...

.

Dryad Press also published The Wild Piano by Barbara Lefcowitz

Barbara Lefcowitz

Barbara Lefcowitz is a published poet from Bethesda, Maryland, whose books include Red and White Lies and Photo, Bomb, Red Chair: New Poems....

in 1981.