Academic resources and information

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Desk and exam copy requests

Educators can request complimentary desk copies of titles they have already adopted for course use, or can request exam copies of titles they are considering teaching for a small fee via Ingram Academic Services. Please search by ISBN to find your desired title. You can browse all Milkweed desk and exam titles available via Ingram Academic Services here. In your request, you will be required to provide your name, address, email, educational institution, and relevant course information. Please email deskcopy@milkweed.org if your desired book is not available via Ingram Academic Services or if you have any other questions or concerns.

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Bulk orders and custom printings

School bookstores must place book orders via our distributor Publishers Group West/Ingram.

If your institution selected a book published by Milkweed Editions for your Common Read program, please email orders@milkweed.org for bulk book ordering options. Custom printing options may be available for your bulk order over 1,000 copies for Common Read programs.

Educators placing their own classroom or event orders via milkweed.org can use the coupon code SCHOOL48 at checkout to receive a 48% nonreturnable discount. These book orders must not be for resale.

Invoicing and wholesale direct order options are available by emailing orders@milkweed.org with your detailed request. We cannot fulfill course book direct orders to Barnes & Noble or Follett affiliated bookstores.

BROWSE BOOKS HERE

Reader’s guides and reading lists

When available, discussion questions are accessible to educators and workshop leaders as downloadable PDFs via individual book pages by clicking “Reader’s Guide.”

Reading lists for Indigenous Studies, Climate Change & the Environment, University & Library Common Read Selections, Frequently Taught Poetry, Nonfiction & Craft, and more are available here.  

BROWSE READING LISTS

  • Perma Red

    A Novel
    By Debra Magpie Earling

    Bold, passionate, and more urgent than ever, Debra Magpie Earling’s powerful classic novel is reborn in this new edition. On the Flathead Indian Reservation, summer is ending, and Louise White Elk is determined to forge her own path. Louise and her younger sister have grown up into the harsh social and physical landscape of western Montana in the 1940s, where Native people endure boarding schools and life far from home. As she approaches adulthood, Louise hopes to create an independent life for herself and an improved future for her family—but three persistent men have other plans. DOWNLOAD NOW

  • The Life and Death of a Minke Whale in the Amazon

    Dispatches from the Brazilian Rainforest
    By Fábio Zuker
    Translated by Ezra E. Fitz

    As the Amazon burns, Fábio Zuker shares stories of resistance, self-determination, and kinship with the land. In these essays, Zuker shares intimate stories of life in the rainforest and its surrounding cities during an age of raging wildfires, mass migration, populist politics, and increasing deforestation. DOWNLOAD NOW

  • Sinkhole

    A Legacy of Suicide
    By Juliet Patterson

    A sublimely elegant, fractured reckoning with the legacy and inheritance of suicide in one American family. In 2009, Juliet Patterson was recovering from a serious car accident when she learned her father had died by suicide. His death was part of a disturbing pattern in her family. Her father’s father had taken his own life; so had her mother’s. Over the weeks and months that followed, grieving and in physical pain, Patterson kept returning to one question: Why? Sinkhole richly layers personal, familial, political, and environmental histories to provide not answers but essential, heartbreaking truth. DOWNLOAD NOW

  • Thin Places

    A Natural History of Healing and Home
    By Kerri ní Dochartaigh

    An Indies Introduce Selection for Winter/Spring 2022
    An Indie Next Selection for April 2022
    A Junior Library Guild Selection for Spring 2022

    In Thin Places, a luminous blend of memoir, history, and nature writing, ní Dochartaigh explores how nature kept her sane and helped her heal, how violence and poverty are never more than a stone’s throw from beauty and hope, and how we are, once again, allowing our borders to become hard and terror to creep back in. DOWNLOAD NOW

  • Braiding Sweetgrass

    Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
    By Robin Wall Kimmerer

    A New York Times Bestseller
    A Washington Post Bestseller
    Named a “Best Essay Collection of the Decade” by Literary Hub

    Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. DOWNLOAD NOW

  • Dear Memory

    Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief
    By Victoria Chang

    An Electric Literature Favorite Nonfiction Book of 2021
    A TIME Magazine Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2021

    From poet Victoria Chang, a collection of literary letters and mementos on the art of remembering across generations. In letters to family, past teachers, and fellow poets, as the imagination, Dear Memory offers a model for what it looks like to find ourselves in our histories. DOWNLOAD NOW

  • Graceland, At Last

    Notes on Hope and Heartache from the American South
    By Margaret Renkl

    Winner of the 2022 Southern Book Prize
    Winner of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

    For the past four years, Margaret Renkl’s columns have offered readers of the New York Times a weekly dose of natural beauty, human decency, and persistent hope from her home in Nashville. Now more than sixty of those pieces have been brought together in this sparkling new collection. DOWNLOAD NOW

  • The Home Place

    Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature
    By J. Drew Lanham

    Winner of the 2017 Southern Book Prize
    Winner of the Reed Award from the Southern Environmental Law Center
    Finalist for the John Burroughs Medal
    Named a “Best Scholarly Book of the Decade” by The Chronicle of Higher Education

    From these fertile soils—of love, land, identity, family, and race—emerges The Home Place, a big-hearted, unforgettable memoir by ornithologist J. Drew Lanham. DOWNLOAD NOW

    Permissions and accessibility

    Copyrighted material from Milkweed Editions is available to educators and students for classroom use through the Copyright Clearance Center and Mosaic. Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Children’s Literature titles are available. For any requests related to material not found there, please contact Fred Courtright of The Permissions Company at permdude@eclipse.net.

    For education accessibility PDF requests, please email deskcopy@milkweed.org with the relevant title and course information.

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    Seedbank

    A New Series of World Literature
    Seedbank 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.

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    • The Popol Vuh

      By Michael Bazzett

      A New York Times Best Poetry Book of 2018

      The K’iche’ creation myth of The Popol Vuh is thousands of years old, one of the only epics indigenous to the Americas. By turns poetic and lucid, sinuous and accessible, this verse translation—the first of its kind, and the first in the Seedbank series—breathes new life into an essential tale. LEARN MORE.

    • Listening to the Wind

      By Tim Robinson

      From cartographer Tim Robinson comes the second title in the Seedbank series, a breathtakingly intimate exploration of one beloved place’s geography, ecology, and history. Footstep by footstep, moment by moment, Robinson takes readers deep into this storied Irish landscape, from the “quibbling, contentious terrain” of Bogland to the shorelines of Inis Ní to the towering peaks of Twelve Pins. LEARN MORE.

    • When the Whales Leave

      By Yuri Rytkheu
      Translated by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse

      Nau’s greatest joy is to visit the sea, where whales gather every morning to gaily spout rainbows. Then, one day, she finds a man in the mist where a whale should be: Reu, who has taken human form out of his Great Love for her. This Seedbank series novel is at once a vibrant retelling of the origin story of the Chukchi and a timely parable about the destructive power of human ego. LEARN MORE.

    • The Blue Sky

      By Galsan Tschinag
      Translated by Katharina Rout

      In the high Altai Mountains of northern Mongolia, the nomadic Tuvan people’s ancient way of life is colliding with the pervasive influence of modernity. And for Dshurukawaa, a young shepherd boy, this means loss—of his siblings, of his grandmother, and of his beloved dog, Arsylang. Rooted in the oral traditions of the Tuvan people and their epics—reissued as a Seedbank title—weaves the timeless story of a boy poised on the cusp of manhood with the tale of a people’s vanishing way of life. LEARN MORE.

    • Stone-Garland

      Six Poets from the Greek Lyric Tradition
      By Dan Beachy-Quick

      A New York Times Book Review “New & Noteworthy” Poetry Collection
      A Book Riot “Best Fall 2020 Book in Translation”

      Stone-Garland, this new entry in the Seedbank Series, presents translations of poem six poets of the Greek lyric tradition. Anecdotes of Simonides, Anacreon, Archilochus, Theognis, Alcman, and Callimachus may be easy to come by but their poems are restored less often. Dan Beachy-Quick is our guide on this walk through a ruin of lyric poetry. To these reclaimed fragments he brings a love of discovery through lyricism. Returning to the foundations of a poetic tradition that has evolved throughout the ages is a chance to rekindle past identities and relationships to the world. LEARN MORE.

      Multiverse

      A Literary Series Dedicated to Different Ways of Languaging
      Multiverse is a literary series devoted to different ways of languaging, curated by neurodivergent poet Chris Martin, and featuring a chorus of editorial voices. Multiverse primarily emerges from the practices and creativity of neurodivergent, autistic, neuroqueer, mad, nonspeaking, and disabled cultures. The desire of Multiverse is to serially surface multiple universes of underheard language that might intersect, resonate, and aggregate toward liberatory futures. In other words, each book in the Multiverse series gestures toward a correspondence—human and more-than-human—that lovingly exceeds what is normal and normative in our society, questioning and augmenting what literary culture is, has been, and can be.

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      • The Kissing of Kissing

        By Hannah Emerson

        In this remarkable debut, which marks the beginning of Multiverse—a literary series written and curated by the neurodivergent­—Hannah Emerson’s poems keep, dream, bring, please, grownd, sing, kiss, and listen. They move with and within the beautiful nothing (“of buzzing light”) from which, as she elaborates, everything jumps. LEARN MORE.

      • The Wanting Way

        By Adam Wolfond

        In The Wanting Way, the second book in Multiverse, Adam Wolfond proves more than willing to “extend the choreography.” In fact, his entire thrust is out and toward. Each poem moves out along its own underutilized pathway, awakening unseen dimensions for the reader like a wooded night walk suddenly lit by fireflies. LEARN MORE.

      • Aster of Ceremonies

        By JJJJJerome Ellis

        Through the grateful invocations of ancestors—Hannah, Mariah, Kit, Jan, and others—and their songs, he rewrites history, creating a world that blooms backward, reimagining what it means for Black and disabled people to have taken, and to continue to take, their freedom. LEARN MORE.