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Rajiv Mohabir tells us about writing Banbas/Exile: A Ramayan Retelling—how it emerged from his grandmother’s language that was banned in his childhood home, to the way it can challenge fossilized ideas of dharma and religion.

I never set out to write this book. Its songs and stories sang me into body and spirit. Through this excavation of myself through the stories that were part of my bloodline for generations, intentionally obscured by colonial masters and British education, I leaned into the unknowing until it grew wings and painted rainbows in my sky. I think this is the work…

In celebration of LOW FLYING PLANES, we connected with Hajjar Baban, winner of the 2025 National Poetry Series selected by Jake Skeets, to discuss the mountain as a generative presence, the trust that spirituality requires, and miraculous openings in poetics from the artists who stumbled through the valley before us to the great Wikipedia.

KH: Why did you choose poetics to explore themes of identity and estrangement? What about the poem opens complex experiences for you?

HB: I think the poem is the only space I can open those complex experiences, as you put it. I don’t trust…

In this conversation, we talk with Gary Paul Nabhan, author of Water in the Desert, about how dreams and science have influenced his creative practice, the Lebanese poet Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān, and how the process of grieving opens us up to relationality.

Kamra Heldman: How does relationality drive your creative process?

Gary Paul Nabhan: Noticing unanticipated relations between plants and animals, animals and people, people and people are the sparks that ignite my writing fervor. Suddenly, being made aware of these interactions opens the doors of perception, and wild words flow out onto paper.

Kamra Heldman: …

On Wednesday, May 27, Milkweed Editions celebrated the launch for the Into a Darker Wilderness podcast, an accompaniment to the anthology A Darker Wilderness, edited by podcast host Erin Sharkey. There, she was joined by her co-host, Max Ritvo Poetry Prize winner Michael Kleber-Diggs, and podcast producer Davi Gray to share in conversation shaped by artist Miré Regulus. Together, they mused on their motivation behind the podcast’s creation and their plans for season one. They asked listeners: What does wilderness mean for you?

We’ll talk to each of the contributors in this book about each…

On Tuesday, May 26th, Milkweed Editions hosted the book launch for Julie Schumacher’s latest book Patient, Female: Stories. There, the Thurber Prize winner was joined in conversation by Claire Lombardo, national-bestselling author of Same As It Ever Was. Together, they discussed the necessity in finding humor within hopelessness, embracing form as challenge, and celebrating her comedic renaissance of the feminine.

There’s such a powerful hit with stories. It’s like a dart to the chest. With novels, you have to get in the water and swim in it, sometimes for days. Stories are a dart. -Julie…

In this conversation, we talk with Julie Schumacher, author of Patient, Female: Stories, about how her reading list influences what writing she produces, the complexity of humor in storytelling, and the writer’s proclivity for studying what is alluring about the people and places around them for inspiration.

Milkweed Staff: While writing Patient, Female, were you influenced or inspired by the works of other writers? In what way?

Julie Schumacher: I feel that my personality and my mood—as well as my writing—are deeply influenced by what I read. And because the stories in Patient, Female were written over…

On Friday, April 3rd, Jake Skeets joined Milkweed in celebration of his latest poetry collection, Horses, at the Minnesota Museum of American Art’s Queering Indigeneity exhibit, curated by Penny Kagigebi and Bethany Whitehead. Along the way, his Minnesota book launch included exploring Minneapolis’ Indigenous offerings from Gatherings Cafe, Owamni by The Sioux Chef, and Birchbark Books. He was joined by Mary Austin Speaker, Dr. Kate Bean, Hope Flanagan, Diane Wilson, Heid E. Erdrich, and Odia Wood-Krueger, among others.

Jake Skeets’ first reading of the night, “Just Before the Silence,”…

In celebration of The Evolution of Fire: Essays on Crisis and Becoming, we sat down with Angela Pelster to discuss meaning in suffering, whether the world is a safe place, and to honor community building as the most sacred part of creating a rich life.

Kamra Heldman: The dream that our perception of our story’s narrative arch will perfectly align with how the people who are a part of it would depict the same events is a true impossibility. How do we reckon with the truth that our understanding of any relationship or experience is singular?

Angela Pelster…

blush / river / fox is the startling English-language debut of Swedish polymath Anna Nygren. The collection is at once a domestic autistic ethnography, a more-than-human erotic pastoral, and an illustrated choreography of bewilderment. In this original piece accompanying the book, Anna contemplates the intersections of the world girl, neuro/queerness, and writing.

there is something with Girl. writing blush had to do with Girl. there is something with Girl that is like a ghost in me. the ghost is like a pretend and a play it is like a soft hurting. there is a ghost of Girl tickling pleasurely unpleasantly…

Jake Skeets—Navajo Nation Poet Laureate, Whiting Award winner, and author of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award–winning Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers—returns with Horses, a powerful and long-awaited second collection. Opening with the haunting image of two hundred horses lost on Navajo land, the book moves through questions of climate change, belonging, and survival, while holding space for beauty, imagination, and joy.

Known for his groundbreaking queer, Indigenous poetics, Skeets continues to explore the deep connections between land, language, and identity, crafting poems that are at once intimate and expansive. Horses is a fierce and…