Piquant Press is a small Canadian publishing house that started in 2009 with a focus on poetry, but expanded into non-fiction projects a few years later. It is the love child of James Dewar and Sue Reynolds and is situated in the town of Port Perry about an hour northeast of Toronto.

As founder and host of Hot Sauced Words, a Toronto poetry series he started in 2007, James Dewar became enthralled by the quality of the poets that he invited to feature every month. He enjoyed helping poets publish chapbooks, but it became obvious that the full-length poetry manuscripts emerging out of the Toronto poetry scene deserved publication and Piquant Press was born. In addition to being the publisher, James is also passionate about the craft and purpose of poetry and offers poetry workshops and writing mentorships.

Sue Reynolds has worked in the publishing world in Canada on and off since her first job as a sixteen-year-old for Methuen Publications and Carswell Law Books. She’s worked in the industry in marketing, book layout and design, graphics and editing. She also worked as the Manager of the Art Department at Harbourfront for several years and one of the programs on her caseload was the International Festival of Authors. She’s been leading writing workshops in Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Practice  and, since 2002, she’s been a certified AWA workshop facilitator. Over the years she’s specialized in memoir, and she loves when a memoir develops in her workshop and she can midwife it through the publishing process.

James and Sue pursue a small number of manuscripts each year to publish. They do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

However, James and Sue started a sister company, Stone’s Throw Publication Services, to ethically and economically help authors who have decided to self publish.

Sue Reynolds & James Dewar from their 2022 Tuscany Retreat with Inkslingers.