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Since its inception in 1980, Milkweed Editions has built an engaged community around “transformative” literature. But in an age where language is slipperier than ever, it feels crucial to make tangible the impact and value of our stories today. This April, I’m thinking about “transformative” stories in the timely context of Earth month; I’m thinking about the ways Milkweed publishes titles that not only represent a vast range of artistic excellence and cultural diversity, but also address some of today’s greatest challenges, like dwindling biodiversity and climate change. In doing so, it champions a list that boldly leads the discourse…

Chris Dombrowski is the author of The River You Touch: Making a Life on Moving Water. He is also the author of Body of Water: A Sage, A Seeker, and the World’s Most Elusive Fish, and of three acclaimed collections of poems. Currently the Assistant Director of the Creative Writing program at the University of Montana, he lives with his family in Missoula.

In the following interview, the famously personable hybrid-author made a stop in to the Milkweed Editions offices in Minneapolis, MN in the midst of touring for his new book, which has just been named a finalist…

On the evening of January 27th, 2023, a few members of the Milkweed team ventured two hours south to the city of Winona, in the “bluff country” of Minnesota. As the sun began to set across the snowy expanse, we traded views of sparkling white fields for road-passes winding through hills and chasing the Mississippi River. Long before we arrived at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum’s Waking Worlds exhibition preview party, I’d begun to ponder what world we had left behind, and what new one awaited. I’d been hoping for an experience immersive enough to stop time if…

ANNOUNCING THE WINNER OF THE 2022–23 JAKE ADAM YORK PRIZE!

Copper Nickel and Milkweed Editions are thrilled to announce that judge Amaud Jamaul Johnson, has chosen Yalie Saweda Kamara’s book Besaydoo as the winner of the 2022–23 Jake Adam York Prize. Besaydoo will be published by Milkweed Editions in Winter 2024, and Kamara will receive $2,000.

Yalie Saweda Kamara is a Sierra Leonean American writer, educator, and researcher from Oakland, California, and the 2022–23 Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet Laureate (two-year term). She has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the National Book Critics Circle, and Callaloo. Kamara’s poetry…

All of us here at Milkweed Editions are saddened by David Rhodes’ passing, and profoundly grateful to have crossed paths with him. The six novels he wrote are among his greatest gifts, and we can think of no better form of reciprocity than engaging with his work.

Milkweed Editions is thrilled to announce that Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water by Kazim Ali has won the 2022 Banff Mountain Book Award for Environmental Literature. The prestigious competition awards $20,000 in cash each year, to be distributed amongst eight individual book category winners that are selected by “an international jury of writers, adventurers and editors.”

Northern Light is the story of a queer Muslim poet, son of political refugees from India, who travels back to his childhood home in northern Manitoba to revisit the Pimicikamak people whose way of life was ravaged by…

Musician Jeffrey Foucault reflects on the his friendship with author Chris Dombrowski and the unique collaboration between friends that created the audiobook for The River You Touch.

An interview with author John Cotter about his forthcoming memoir, Losing Music.

We are thrilled to announce that Courtney Bush has been named one of five winners of the 2022 National Poetry Series. Her manuscript I Love Information was selected by poet Brian Teare and will be published here at Milkweed Editions in August 2023. In addition to publication, Bush will receive $10,000.

Courtney Bush is a poet and filmmaker from the Mississippi Gulf Coast. She is the author of the chapbook Isn’t This Nice? (blush_lit, 2019), and the full-length poetry collection Every Book Is About The Same Thing (Newest York Arts Press, 2022). Her films, made with collaborators Jake Goicoechea and Will Carington, have been…