Blog Posts by Briana Gwin

As an Afro-Latina American citizen, I tend to seek stories that center voices, cultures, experiences, and lifeways historically peripheralized by the Western literary canon. But for all the breadth that I encounter still with every new BIPOC-authored book I read, I am routinely enchanted by a sense of what remains familiar. What lands have you been denied, what spaces have you been neglected in—and rejected from—and from what sunless places were you forced to grow? I ponder these questions as I read, acutely aware of the ways longing for BIPOC authors so often manifests on the page as a reaching…

The year is 2021, and wildfires are ravaging the West Coast. America is in lockdown, and time as we know it has come to a grinding halt.

Enter the poet Jos Charles, whose seminal collection of poems, feeld, was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and just recently, one of “The 25 Most Influential Works of Postwar Queer Literature” in the New York Times Style Magazine. Charles is a trans artist, and no stranger to devastation—so it comes as no surprise that their followup act, a Year & other poems, is as unprecedented as the…

Since its inception in 1980, Milkweed Editions has built an engaged community around “transformative” literature. But in an age where language is slipperier than ever, it feels crucial to make tangible the impact and value of our stories today. This April, I’m thinking about “transformative” stories in the timely context of Earth month; I’m thinking about the ways Milkweed publishes titles that not only represent a vast range of artistic excellence and cultural diversity, but also address some of today’s greatest challenges, like dwindling biodiversity and climate change. In doing so, it champions a list that boldly leads the discourse…

Chris Dombrowski is the author of The River You Touch: Making a Life on Moving Water. He is also the author of Body of Water: A Sage, A Seeker, and the World’s Most Elusive Fish, and of three acclaimed collections of poems. Currently the Assistant Director of the Creative Writing program at the University of Montana, he lives with his family in Missoula.

In the following interview, the famously personable hybrid-author made a stop in to the Milkweed Editions offices in Minneapolis, MN in the midst of touring for his new book, which has just been named a finalist…

On the evening of January 27th, 2023, a few members of the Milkweed team ventured two hours south to the city of Winona, in the “bluff country” of Minnesota. As the sun began to set across the snowy expanse, we traded views of sparkling white fields for road-passes winding through hills and chasing the Mississippi River. Long before we arrived at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum’s Waking Worlds exhibition preview party, I’d begun to ponder what world we had left behind, and what new one awaited. I’d been hoping for an experience immersive enough to stop time if…

Milkweed Editions is thrilled to announce that Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water by Kazim Ali has won the 2022 Banff Mountain Book Award for Environmental Literature. The prestigious competition awards $20,000 in cash each year, to be distributed amongst eight individual book category winners that are selected by “an international jury of writers, adventurers and editors.”

Northern Light is the story of a queer Muslim poet, son of political refugees from India, who travels back to his childhood home in northern Manitoba to revisit the Pimicikamak people whose way of life was ravaged by…