Our Blog

In this conversation, we talk with Julie Schumacher, author of Patient, Female: Stories, about how her reading list influences what writing she produces, the complexity of humor in storytelling, and the writer’s proclivity for studying what is alluring about the people and places around them for inspiration.

Milkweed Staff: While writing Patient, Female, were you influenced or inspired by the works of other writers? In what way?

Julie Schumacher: I feel that my personality and my mood—as well as my writing—are deeply influenced by what I read. And because the stories in Patient, Female were written over…

On Friday, April 3rd, Jake Skeets joined Milkweed in celebration of his latest poetry collection, Horses, at the Minnesota Museum of American Art’s Queering Indigeneity exhibit, curated by Penny Kagigebi and Bethany Whitehead. Along the way, his Minnesota book launch included exploring Minneapolis’ Indigenous offerings from Gatherings Cafe, Owamni by The Sioux Chef, and Birchbark Books. He was joined by Mary Austin Speaker, Dr. Kate Bean, Hope Flanagan, Diane Wilson, Heid E. Erdrich, and Odia Wood-Krueger, among others.

Jake Skeets’ first reading of the night, “Just Before the Silence,”…

In celebration of The Evolution of Fire: Essays on Crisis and Becoming, we sat down with Angela Pelster to discuss meaning in suffering, whether the world is a safe place, and to honor community building as the most sacred part of creating a rich life.

Kamra Heldman: The dream that our perception of our story’s narrative arch will perfectly align with how the people who are a part of it would depict the same events is a true impossibility. How do we reckon with the truth that our understanding of any relationship or experience is singular?

Angela Pelster…

blush / river / fox is the startling English-language debut of Swedish polymath Anna Nygren. The collection is at once a domestic autistic ethnography, a more-than-human erotic pastoral, and an illustrated choreography of bewilderment. In this original piece accompanying the book, Anna contemplates the intersections of the world girl, neuro/queerness, and writing.

there is something with Girl. writing blush had to do with Girl. there is something with Girl that is like a ghost in me. the ghost is like a pretend and a play it is like a soft hurting. there is a ghost of Girl tickling pleasurely unpleasantly…

Jake Skeets—Navajo Nation Poet Laureate, Whiting Award winner, and author of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award–winning Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers—returns with Horses, a powerful and long-awaited second collection. Opening with the haunting image of two hundred horses lost on Navajo land, the book moves through questions of climate change, belonging, and survival, while holding space for beauty, imagination, and joy.

Known for his groundbreaking queer, Indigenous poetics, Skeets continues to explore the deep connections between land, language, and identity, crafting poems that are at once intimate and expansive. Horses is a fierce and…

On Thursday, February 26th, local author Jessica Nordell partnered with Milkweed Editions and The Loft Literary Center on a benefit reading for the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota responding to the current, ongoing tensions within the Twin Cities and our surrounding communities. They were joined by writers Curtis Sittenfeld, Sarah Ghazal Ali, Michael Kleber-Diggs, Chaun Webster, Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay, Claire Wahmanholm, Halee Kirkwood, Lara Mimosa Montes, and Jessica Nordell for a night of collective healing. All proceeds benefitted the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota. 

All around us, at first, were…

Following a night of poetry with Minnesota Writers Respond, PEN America and Milkweed Editions presented “On Bread, Borders, and Belonging,” offering a pulse-check on the tensions in the Twin Cities during Operation Metro Surge. Panelists included PEN America President Dinaw Mengestu, PEN International president Burhan Sönmez, Emmy-nominated Taste the Nation host Padma Lakshmi, and Out of the Sierra author Victoria Blanco, guided in conversation by Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf. Opening the event was children’s author Monica Rojas with a reading of Nana and Abuela, while poet Ollie Schminkey closed with a poem on Minnesotan…

On February fifth, Marne Zafar sat down for a Friends Lecture at the Minneapolis Institute of Art with Max Ritvo-award winning poet Michael Kleber-Diggs and Publisher Daniel Slager. Together, they discussed dual perspectives between author and publisher, from winning awards to forging literary friendships within the Twin Cities.  

Good people show up where they’re meant to be. —Michael Kleber-Diggs

This line, from his poetry collection Worldly Things, won’t be read until later in the night, but the crowd that gathers in the Minneapolis Institute of Art already evokes this notion. Just as tonight’s Friends Lecture suggests, everyone checks up…

In celebration of his newest poetry collection, Nocturama, we spoke with Will Brewer about his experience with critical mentorship from Louise Glück, listening for the lightning strike, and the hope for a poem to exist as a flash that echoes beyond its reading.

Milkweed Staff: Henri Cole likened your voice to Robert Frost’s, whose America was lonely, bewildered, and grieving. What are the characteristics of your America? How does your relationship with the United States influence your poetics?

Will Brewer: I never think about “poetics,” period! As for America, I never sit down and think to discuss it…

ANNOUNCING THE WINNER OF THE 2025–26 JAKE ADAM YORK PRIZE!

Copper Nickel and Milkweed Editions are thrilled to announce that judge Patricia Smith has chosen Constant Laval Williams’ book Elegy with Beautiful Child as the winner of the 2025–26 Jake Adam York Prize. Elegy with Beautiful Child will be published by Milkweed Editions in January of 2027, and Williams will receive $2,000.

Constant Laval Williams received the Beau J. Boudreaux Poetry Award at the University of Southern California and holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He volunteers as a senior reader for Ploughshares, and…