Blog Posts by Milkweed Staff

A locally grown collaboration with national impact: Indigenous Library Steward-sustaining Partnership

Photograph by Anna Min

Chris La Tray placing his book Becoming Little Shell into the new Indigenous Little Free Library at Red Lake Nation College in Minneapolis.

Milkweed Editions and Little Free Library are excited to share our new “steward-sustaining” partnership for the Indigenous Little Free Library Program.

What is the Indigenous Little Free Library Program? Little Free Library grants no-cost book-sharing boxes where needed most on tribal lands and in Indigenous communities in the United States and Canada. They work with Indigenous community leaders and members to place book exchanges in locations where book access is important to improving literacy. Learn more here.

Intended to help sustain the library selections for these granted libraries…

Because reading is life-changing, and books make the best gifts! In addition to our perennial favorite gift book, the hardcover special edition of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, our hand-selected recommendations are here to help you work through your holiday list.

Join our membership program to support the publication of life-changing literature like this and receive a 20% discount on all Milkweed books! Learn more here.

For the romantic adventurer:
North American Odyssey by Amy & Dave Freeman

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Imagine taking a 12,000 mile journey from the Pacific Northwest, through Canada, and all the way down the…

Please join us in honoring and celebrating […] by Fady Joudah, 2024 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.

“Fady Joudah’s […] scribes the elliptical seam between heritage and history into a sustained meditation on war, displacement, and love. Punctuated with the music of maqam in the marrow of its mission, this timeless collection illuminates an existential Palestinian struggle that rises to the universal through Joudah’s deft, querying verse.”—National Book Award judges citation

From the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize winner and one of our most acclaimed contemporary writers, this urgent and essential collection combats the erasure of Palestinian resistance and…

By Melissa Kwasny

One of the first things I learned as a hospice volunteer is to think of death not as a medical emergency but rather as a spiritual event. After attending many deaths, including that of both my parents, I have learned something else: dying is a spiritual process, not a moment. It is a process not only for the person experiencing it but also for their loved ones who are left with grief.

Grief is universal. All peoples, and most animals, experience it. It is, paradoxically, also individual. We each suffer grief uniquely. It is perhaps our…

Weijia Pan’s debut collection of poems, Motherlands, was selected by the late Louise Glück as the winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize in 2024. Among other things, the book is a transnational exploration of personal, familial, and cultural trauma, as well as the more universal trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic. Pan’s poetry draws on countless juxtapositions (of two countries, two languages, past and present, and national loyalty versus personal transparency), questioning “home,” nostalgia, and self-exile in order to express himself through the lens of a dual citizen. In the following interview conducted by Milkweed Editions, Pan opens up about the…

CREDIT ILJA HERB

Milkweed Editions is deeply saddened to share that Darrel J. McLeod passed away late last week after a sudden illness. He was 67. Darrel was an uncommonly beautiful and gentle soul whose stories about finding his voice as a two-spirit, Indigenous man moved readers across the globe. Along with his activism and service to Indigenous causes, particularly in Canada, his books brought forth vital stories of heritage, compassion, forgiveness, and hope.

“I am saddened by the news of Darrel’s passing, if also profoundly grateful to have called him a friend. He was an exceptionally beautiful human being.”—Daniel Slager, Publisher…

How do artists work within constrictions of time? How can our existence be traced through art? How does writing ekphrastic poetry compare with linguistic translation? How is historical time considered with care in stretching both towards the past and into the future? These are some of the questions poet Jessica Fisher unpacks with her work in Daywork and in our Q&A below!

Milkweed Staff: Daywork takes its title from the giornata—the term in fresco painting for the section of wet plaster that can be painted in a single day. When did you first discover this concept? And what…

Upon their return from the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Dubai, authors Diane Wilson and Erin Sharkey asked themselves: What do conversations about climate change mean for us as writers?

“Distinguished by his courage to speak in the face of the unspeakable,
in poems of lyric concision and intensity.”

Poets & Writers announced today that Fady Joudah has won the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize, which this year carries an increased award of $100,000. Given annually by Poets & Writers to recognize an American poet of exceptional talent, the prize is endowed by a gift from the Liana Foundation and is named for the John and Susan Jackson family. There is no application process; poets are nominated by a panel of their peers, selected by Poets & Writers, who remain…

Milkweed is deeply saddened by the recent passing of Vietnamese Buddhist monk Tuệ Sỹ, whose poems we published in a bilingual edition last year as Dreaming the Mountain, with translations by Nguyen Ba Chung and Martha Collins. Born in 1943, Tuệ Sỹ joined a Zen order at the age of ten and later became an eminent Buddhist scholar, professor, translator, and poet. He actively resisted the idea that Buddhism should serve as a tool for any political agenda, and was well known for his dissidence.

Following study at the Institute of Buddhism in Nha Trang, Tuệ Sỹ moved to Saigon…