Since the advent of language we have understood our world, and passed that understanding from one generation to the next, through story and song. From the Aboriginal stories of the Dreamtime to the Original Instructions of the Ojibwe, and from the Mayan Popol Vuh to medieval bestiaries, the imaginative expression of human experience offers essential tools for reflection on our relationship to the world around us. 

Today, however, the stories that have guided human interaction with ecosystems for millennia are steadily disappearing, as cultural and linguistic diversity disappears at a pace matching the loss of biological diversity. In response to this trajectory, and with the understanding that literature has been a source of cultural transformation throughout modern history, Milkweed Editions launched the Seedbank series of books.

This new series of world literature expands Milkweed’s publishing program to bring ancient, historical, and contemporary works from cultures from around the world to American readers. Just as repositories around the world gather seeds to ensure biodiversity in the future, Seedbank gathers works of literature from around the world that foster conversation and reflection on the human relationship to place and the natural world—exposing readers to new, endangered, and forgotten ways of seeing the world.