Haŋ (hello) Milkweed community, my name is Kachina Yeager and I am the Editorial Fellow here at Milkweed Editions. Our team is delighted to share with you the cover for Debra Magpie Earling’s forthcoming reissue of Perma Red—out August 2022. I was lucky enough to get to chat with Debra Magpie Earling about this remarkable novel, and I’m so excited to share that conversation with our wider community!

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 only for a moment; an homage to…

“A stutter is an heirloom—something precious, that should be cherished.”

JJJJJerome Ellis inherited his stutter from his mother, who also stutters. They don’t speak often of their shared inheritance but she is supportive of his work. He sees his stutter as an heirloom and his teacher—both in language and in music. He has learned to gracefully accept and even anticipate how it informs his artistic processes of speaking and performing. In his new book, Aster of Ceremonies, he creates a world that blooms backward, reimagining what it means for Black and disabled people to have taken, and to…

Milkweed Editions is thrilled to share Ada Limón’s signature project as the nation’s twenty-fourth Poet Laureate, You Are Here, which will feature two complementary initiatives: a new anthology of commissioned nature poems, and poetry installed as public art in seven national parks.

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…

We’re thrilled to introduce you to the newest member of our team: Jane Townsend! In her new role as Milkweed’s Vice President of Advancement, Jane will develop and implement strategies designed to increase philanthropic support for Milkweed Editions. She brings over twenty years of nonprofit fundraising experience to the role. Prior to joining Milkweed, Jane spent thirteen of those years with the University of Minnesota Foundation as a senior development officer, associate director of planned giving, and director of trusts and estates. She also served as managing director of development for P…

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 for the Montana Book Award. He…

The year is 2021, and wildfires are ravaging the West Coast. America is in lockdown, and time as we know it has come to a grinding halt.

Enter the poet Jos Charles, whose seminal collection of poems, feeld, was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and just recently, one of “The 25 Most Influential Works of Postwar Queer Literature” in the New York Times Style Magazine. Charles is a trans artist, and no stranger to devastation—so it comes as no surprise that their followup act, a Year & other poems, is as unprecedented as the times that gave rise to their weight. Guided by her terse-yet-prescient…

Shilpi Suneja’s mother in Goa on her honeymoon.

Shilpi Suneja’s debut novel House of Caravans is filled with life and intrigue as one family navigates post-Partition India and the many complicated dynamics that are left in the wake of political turmoil. Suneja shared with Milkweed Staff the personal stories that inspired the novel as well as the importance of Partition novels to the American literary dialectic.

Milkweed Staff (MS): The family in House of Caravans in so many ways is a microcosmic embodiment of many of the larger political and cultural tensions that have divided many post-Partition. Why write about a family when exploring…

Milkweed Editions is thrilled to announce that Caroline Harper New has won the 2023 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry. This is the final year that Milkweed will award the prize. New has won for her poetry collection A History of Half-Birds, selected by Maggie Smith. She will receive $10,000 and publication by Milkweed Editions in January 2024.

Caroline Harper New is a poet and artist from southern Georgia with a background in anthropology. Her work includes ecopoetic short films, painting exhibitions, children’s book illustrations, and ethnographic research in Madagascar. Her poems have…

Milkweed Staff (MS): In your first book, Thin Places, you write about being born during the height of the Troubles in Ireland. In that book, you asked readers to reclaim our landscape through language and to remember that the land we fight over is much more than lines on a map. In Cacophony of Bone, you write about another time of great upheaval and trauma: the global pandemic of 2020. How do you connect these two books in your mind?

Kerri ní Dochartaigh (KnD): When I first spoke to my British editor after acquisition, he told me how excited he was to publish the book, as it was “the follow…