Blog Posts by Milkweed Staff

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…

In anticipation of the release of The Possibility of Tenderness this fall, we sat down with author Jason Allen-Paisant. It was an illuminating and profound conversation with wonderful insight of what is in store in the book.

Milkweed: The title of the book, The Possibility of Tenderness, is such a wonderful and welcoming lead into what the reader will find between its pages. Can you say a bit more about what you mean about tenderness and how the book explores it?

Jason: Racism doesn’t just affect how people are treated—it affects how people experience time. One of…

Photograph by Christopher Zebo

ANNOUNCING THE WINNER OF THE 2024–25 JAKE ADAM YORK PRIZE

Milkweed Editions and Copper Nickel are thrilled to announce that judge Matthew Olzmann has chosen Bo Hee Moon’s book Birthstones in the Province of Mercy as the winner of the 2024–25 Jake Adam York Prize. Birthstones in the Province of Mercy will be published by Milkweed Editions in January, 2026, and Moon will receive $2,000. 

A South Korean adoptee, Bo Hee Moon is the author of one previous book of poems, Omma, Sea of Joy and Other Astrological Signs, which she published under another name with…

We recently sat down with author (and Milkweed editor-at-large) Helen Whybrow to talk about her forthcoming book, The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life. Touching on everything from cycles of life in nature to the art of belonging to parenting on a farm, read on for a taste of what’s to come in this profoundly moving book.

Photograph by Helen Whybrow

Milkweed Staff: A favorite section from the book is your description of belonging actually being a practice of participation. Can you say a bit more about how that looks as a Shepherd, mother, and activist?

Helen Whybrow: Belonging is something so…

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…