In 1954, Fred Cogswell and a group of students and faculty associated with The Fiddlehead magazine founded Fiddlehead Poetry Books ?to give the public a chance to read the work of new Canadian poets.? The first volume was Cogswell's own first collection, The Stunted Strong, a sonnet sequence that sets vivid sketches of country people confined by frustration, obsession, and small victories against the illimitable dreams and thwarting limitations of the human condition. This second edition of The Stunted Strong is published to commemorate the life that Fred Cogswell so generously devoted to poetry and its makers. Between 1958, when he became the publisher of Fiddlehead Poetry Books, and 1981, when he retired, he published more than three hundred collections. He launched the careers of Frances Itani, Roo Borson, Joy Kogawa, Marilyn Bowering, Don Gutteridge, and Alden Nowlan, and he published early books by Al Purdy, Norman Levine, Dorothy Livesay, and David Solway. In 1982, Peter Thomas became the new publisher, and, deciding to publish prose as well as poetry, he changed the imprint to Goose Lane Editions.

Fred Cogswell (d. 2004) was a poet, UNB professor, editor, translator, and mentor to many aspiring writers. A long-serving editor of The Fiddlehead and founder of Fiddlehead Poetry Books, he was the author of more than twenty books of verse. With Jo-Anne Elder, he translated Climats and Conversations by Herménégilde Chiasson and edited and translated Rêves inachevés / Unfinished Dreams (Goose Lane, 1990), an anthology of contemporary Acadian poets.