Blog Posts by Milkweed Staff

This August, we’re proud to celebrate the one-year reopening anniversary of our brick-and-mortar bookstore, Milkweed Books! Originally established in 2016 at the nation’s largest literary center, Open Book, Milkweed Books is the realization of a long-held dream to deepen our connection to community, and to introduce readers to transformative books and authors that align with our mission and values. Despite closure in 2020, we were thrilled to reinstate our beloved public space in the summer of 2022. We continue to enrich our neighborhood with a vital, newly reimagined community asset that connects people with stories through book sales, exciting…

We’re thrilled to introduce you to the newest member of our team: Jane Townsend! In her new role as Milkweed’s Vice President of Advancement, Jane will develop and implement strategies designed to increase philanthropic support for Milkweed Editions. She brings over twenty years of nonprofit fundraising experience to the role. Prior to joining Milkweed, Jane spent thirteen of those years with the University of Minnesota Foundation as a senior development officer, associate director of planned giving, and director of trusts and estates. She also served as managing director of development for Project Success, as inaugural development director for the Native…

On the morning of Tuesday, June 27, the Milkweed Editions team hosted a special guest in our office in Minneapolis. The guest in question was none other than Nicholas Triolo, a prolific mountain and trail athlete by day, and an esteemed writer and editor by night. He’s the current Senior Editor at Outside Run & Trail Runner Magazine, and the former Digital Strategist for Orion Magazine—so suffice to say, he’s encountered his fair share of exceptional stories. But the creative athlete didn’t visit to boast about previous work experiences: he came to share an exceptional story of…

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 times…

“In the beginning, yes, a garden. As lush as you’re imagining.” So begins K. Iver’s tender and heart-wrenching debut; what follows is a coming of age story of creation and demise, a love story upended by suicide. The collection’s fleeting first images of doting parents (a fantasy), dogwoods in bloom, a boy—later referred to by the poems’ speaker as Missy—who “looks at you the way someone must have when you were born” quickly give way to images of a paternal pattern of abuse, the cold interior of a psychiatric hospital, a mental-health-crisis-turned-exorcism, and in a poem called “god,” a closed-casket…

Shilpi Suneja’s mother in Goa on her honeymoon.

Shilpi Suneja’s debut novel House of Caravans is filled with life and intrigue as one family navigates post-Partition India and the many complicated dynamics that are left in the wake of political turmoil. Suneja shared with Milkweed Staff the personal stories that inspired the novel as well as the importance of Partition novels to the American literary dialectic.

Milkweed Staff (MS): The family in House of Caravans in so many ways is a microcosmic embodiment of many of the larger political and cultural tensions that have divided many post-Partition. Why write about a family when exploring these tensions?

Shilpi Suneja (SS)…

Milkweed Editions is thrilled to announce that Caroline Harper New has won the 2023 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry. This is the final year that Milkweed will award the prize. New has won for her poetry collection A History of Half-Birds, selected by Maggie Smith. She will receive $10,000 and publication by Milkweed Editions in January 2024.

Caroline Harper New is a poet and artist from southern Georgia with a background in anthropology. Her work includes ecopoetic short films, painting exhibitions, children’s book illustrations, and ethnographic research in Madagascar. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American…

Milkweed Staff (MS): In your first book, Thin Places, you write about being born during the height of the Troubles in Ireland. In that book, you asked readers to reclaim our landscape through language and to remember that the land we fight over is much more than lines on a map. In Cacophony of Bone, you write about another time of great upheaval and trauma: the global pandemic of 2020. How do you connect these two books in your mind?

Kerri ní Dochartaigh (KnD): When I first spoke to my British editor after acquisition, he told me…

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…