“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.

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 appeared…

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 up…

Ibrahim Badshah

We are thrilled to announce that Weijia Pan is the winner of the 2023 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. His manuscript, titled Motherlands, was selected by judge Louise Glück and will be published in September 2024. In addition to publication, Weijia Pan will receive $10,000.

We at Milkweed Editions are deeply saddened by the loss of Louise Glück, a deeply generous and prolific member of the literary community. Glück worked closely with our team to select Motherlands, and with Weijia Pan to develop the manuscript. Her attention and care to this process is emblematic of her brilliance as a poet and her…

When Priyanka Kumar began writing her debut memoir, Conversations with Birds, she had a profound realization. Since the dawn of the Information Age, modern Americans have struggled to find fulfillment in their lives more than ever before—but to Kumar, the solution to this problem was surprisingly simple, and could be found in a single word. “We’re at a crossroads in the world,” Kumar says. “Our lives have become fragmented in so many ways by all these devices that we’re basically living inside of now. But there’s something in us that’s very human and wants to break open, that remembers a…

On the first day of the new year, we received an exciting and somewhat extraordinary message confirming that one of our books, The Quickening by Pulitzer Prize finalist Elizabeth Rush, is now available in the Little Free Library at the South Pole! For us, the announcement is cause for celebration, as well as gratitude and reflection. We are humbled by the ways in which The Quickening has made waves in the world. And what book could be a better fit for the South Pole’s collection than this one, whose apt subtitle is Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth? Scroll down to read the…

Books often come to us at Milkweed Editions in unusual ways, and Bitterroot Salish author Debra Magpie Earling’s work is no exception. The Missoula, Montana-based writer was highly referred to our Publisher & CEO Daniel Slager by Chris Dombrowski, a fellow Missoulian author who had already published a book with us. Slager was intrigued to learn that Earling had broken ground in the literary world with the publication of her highly-successful debut novel, Perma Red, back in 2002, only for the imprint to shutter its doors four years later, sending the novel out of print. He became even more…