Outriders Poetry Project, started in 1968, is a privately funded organization operating in Buffalo, NY that sponsors readings and publishes books by poets and writers based in the greater Niagara-Erie region.
In 1978 and 1979, Outriders, through its director, co-sponsored Summer Poetry Festivals with Artpark (Lewiston, NY) and the University at Buffalo, featuring, among others, Marvin Bell, Irving Feldman, Canada’s Four Horsemen (bpNichol, Paul Dutton, Steve McCaffery and Rafael Barreto-Rivera), Anselm Hollo, David Ignatow, J.F.
Nims, Carlene Polite, Mark Rudman, Louis Simpson, William Stafford, Gerald Stern, Virginia Terris, and Harriett Zinnes.
In 2009, Wickert revived it as a small press which has since issued Ann Goldsmith’s The Spaces Between Us and Martin Pops’s Minoxidyl and Other Stories(2010); Judith Slater's The Wind Turning Pages (2011), Max Wickert's No Cartoons (2011), Gail Fischer's Red Ball Jets (2011), Jeremiah Rush Bowen's Consolations (2012) and Jerry McGuire's Venus Transit as well as An Outriders Anthology: Poetry in Buffalo 1969-1979 and After (2013),Jacob Schepers' A Bundle of Careful Compromises and Linda Stern Zisquit's Return from Elsewhere(2014); Edric Mesmer's of monody and homophonies (2015); the anthology Four Buffalo Poets: Ansie Baird, Ann Goldsmith, David Landrey, Sam Magavern (2016); Carole Southwood's Listen and See: Twenty-Two Poems and a Story; and most recently, Carole Southwood's non-fiction novel Abdoo: The Biography of a Piece of White Trash.
The winners of this competition were Jeremiah Rush Bowen (2011); Jerry McGuire (2012), Jacob Schepers and Linda Zisquit (co-winners 2014); and Edric Mesmer, Of Monodies and Homophony (2015).