Blog Posts by Julian Randall

Hello Milkweed True Believers and Happy February! For this month’s Deep Cuts series we have a special treat for you in the form of a new interview with future Milkweed author and co-founder of the Free Black Dirt collective, Erin Sharkey! This month we take an in-depth look at a forthcoming anthology of Black archival writing as relates to the history of slavery and freedom and migration for Black life here in Minnesota and in the wider country, how we reckon with what she deftly calls “the politics of nature.” It was an honor to sit a spell with Erin’s enormous vision for Blackness, history, the future, and what this anthology can and should mean to us, to all of us!

Happy new year to you and happy fortieth anniversary year to all of us here at Milkweed! This year of blog content will seek to highlight what glows about the past, present, and future here at Milkweed, and there’s no more fitting space for us to begin than with a celebration of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants!

Since its release in 2014, Braiding Sweetgrass has epitomized our mission of publishing and supporting superb work that is deeply in conversation with our natural world. With over 300,000 copies sold, Braiding Sweetgrass was…

Happy December fellow readers, and welcome to another edition of Deep Cuts! In this series I have the privilege of diving in with the author of a compelling Milkweed title and discussing the behind-the-scenes work that goes into the composition and production of their book.

This month, we’re highlighting Sarah Ruhl and Max Ritvo’s collaborative book, Letters from Max: A Poet, A Teacher, A Friendship, which we released in paperback in September. We know this book has had an enormous impact on readers’ lives. Spanning four years of Sarah’s and Max’s lives, Letters from Max explores illness, art, spirituality…

Welcome to our second installment of 5 Reasons to Teach This Book! In this new interview series, I’ll be investigating and straight-up admiring some of Milkweed’s titles via conversations with educators, authors and booksellers. Through this dialogue, we’ll expose the nuts-and-bolts of anthology curation and highlight some exciting pedagogical takes that will make your students want to steal this book from you. This month we are featuring Hearth: A Global Conversation on Community, Identity and Place, an anthology co-edited by Susan O’Connor and Annick Smith that we published in paperback this August.

Hearth’s table of contents boasts…

Happy October Milkweed fans and friends! I’d like to introduce the second blog series that I will be curating this year, which we are calling Deep Cuts! In this series I have the privilege of diving in with the author of a compelling Milkweed title and discussing the behind-the-scenes work that goes into the composition and production of their book.

This month, I interviewed the inimitable Rick Barot around his collection of poems The Galleons, forthcoming February 2020. At once intimate and historical, The Galleons articulates both loss and life with always impeccable precision. I’ve been a tremendous…

Welcome to 5 Reasons to Teach This Book! In this new interview series, I’ll be investigating and straight-up admiring some of Milkweed’s titles via conversations with educators, authors and booksellers. We’ll get down to the nuts-and-bolts of anthologies as well as some exciting pedagogical takes that will make your students want to steal this book from you. While the title of this series is prescriptive, we hope that your engagement with the dialogue is organic and that you find entry points into the texts that align with your goals as a teacher, reader, writer, or literary advocate.

As the…