Judy Doyle to Retire from Curbstone Press

By Judith Rosen -- Publishers Weekly, 7/1/2009 4:03:00 PM

Curbstone Press cofounder Judy Doyle announced that she will formally retire from the publishing house that she and her late husband, Alexander (Sandy) Taylor, founded in the basement of their home in Willimantic, Conn., in 1975. Doyle had been on a leave of absence for the past seven months, while the board continued to oversee the day-to-day operations with staffers Bob Smith and Jantje Tielken.

In a letter to friends of the press, board cochairs Paul Von Drasek and George Gibson praised Doyle as “one of the pillars of independent literary publishing in America” and said that they expect to make a decision about Curbstone’s future path by the end of the summer. “We have had productive conversations with potential partners,” they wrote.

In the meantime, the 34-year-old press’s publishing program continues to move forward with distribution through Consortium. This fall Curbstone will publish only one book while it regroups, a reissue of its 2004 English translation of Wandering Star (Sept.) by Jean Marie Gustave Le Clézio, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature last year. The new edition has a redesigned cover and a foreword by Adam Gopnik.

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