Blog Posts by Milkweed Staff

Milkweed Editions and SEWA-AIFW hosted writer Sangamithra Iyer in conversation with local writers Nigar Alam & Sruthi Narayanan for an evening of reflection on family history, language, and water. A CLMP Firecracker Award Winner, Iyer’s memoir Governing Bodies takes the form of three meandering rivers, written as letters to her grandfather, father, and readers. She reflects on her career as a civil engineer and animal rights activist, and explores her own experiences as a woman of color and citizen of the world. Governing Bodies is a lyrical story of lineages and an urgently needed reckoning with the ways bodies are…

We all carry stories about where we come from. Our family histories are tied to particular places—the houses, towns, fields, and landscapes where generations of people have lived and worked. Sometimes those connections are easy to see; sometimes they emerge slowly, through stories, photographs, memories, and the things that have been left behind. For me, loss brought these connections into focus and made me look more closely at the relationship between family history and place.

In my book Sinkhole: A Personal History of Loss and Land, I explore my father’s death by suicide, which led me back into…

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…

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…

ANNOUNCING THE WINNER OF THE 2025–26 JAKE ADAM YORK PRIZE!

Copper Nickel and Milkweed Editions are thrilled to announce that judge Patricia Smith has chosen Constant Laval Williams’ book Elegy with Beautiful Child as the winner of the 2025–26 Jake Adam York Prize. Elegy with Beautiful Child will be published by Milkweed Editions in January of 2027, and Williams will receive $2,000.

Constant Laval Williams received the Beau J. Boudreaux Poetry Award at the University of Southern California and holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He volunteers as a senior reader for Ploughshares, and…

We are thrilled to announce that Hajjar Baban has been named one of five winners of the 2025 National Poetry Series. Her manuscript LOW FLYING PLANES was selected by poet Jake Skeets and will be published by Milkweed Editions in August 2026. In addition to publication, Baban will receive $10,000.

Hajjar Baban is a Pakistan-born Afghan Kurdish poet. Her work appears in publications including Prairie Schooner, Guernica, Poetry Daily, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, where she won the 2025 Poetry Contest, selected by Hieu Minh Nguyen. Recipient of a Pushcart Prize in Poetry, Baban is…

Last fall, I received an amazing invitation from Defne Egbo, a fellow at Gloria’s Foundation, to be part of her Between The Lines literary salon that uplifts the work of emerging authors. On a brisk evening in December, we assembled a confluence of amazing women in a wide range of fields—art, literature, science, education, engineering, policy, planning, media, animal care, social work, and more— in Gloria Steinem’s living room in Manhattan. “Between the Lines, was born out of my own desire to bring online book conversations in person and really ground them around one special book and…

In this conversation, we talk with celebrated translator Bruce Humes about his favorite reads and bookstores, as well as the importance of reading literature in translation. Bruce lives in Taiwan and specializes in translating writing by/about China-based Altaic peoples and Silk Road culture.

If monolingual Americans read more fiction in translation–and US publishers published more!–readers might be better placed to recognize how bizarre Trumpian Norms actually are.—Bruce Humes

Milkweed Staff: What was the first translated book you read?

Bruce Humes: Perhaps Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, translated from Jules Verne’s original in French. I hadn’t a clue…

In anticipation of the release of Governing Bodies: A Memoir, A Confluence, A Watershed this fall, we sat down with author Sangamithra Iyer to learn more about the structure, themes, and interconnected layers in the book, including her work with animal rights.

Milkweed: Governing Bodies is uniquely structured. Can you talk about how you came to that form and why you chose it?

Sangamithra Iyer: Governing Bodies was an ungovernable book to write. The structure was not something I could engineer or impose. The blueprint didn’t come first; it was shaped with iteration over time.

I…