Community Partner Spotlight: Women's Prison Book Project

Milkweed Editions is an independent publisher of literary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Our mission is to identify, nurture, and publish transformative literature, and build an engaged community around it.

As a publisher, we join in thoughtful partnerships to “build an engaged community” around the books and authors we publish. Sometimes partners are community organizations, libraries, or independent bookstores who host readings with the authors we publish. And sometimes our partners are organizations with connections to specific communities of readers that we may not otherwise reach through bookstore, digital, library, or other traditional publishing channels. One such partner is the Women’s Prison Book Project, based here in Minneapolis and serving readers across the nation.

As a publisher, we sometimes find ourselves with more copies of books than we need for our distribution channels. As a nonprofit, we are committed to expanding the impact of our books by ensuring they reach a wide and diverse audience of readers. When we learned of the Women’s Prison Book Project, we were grateful to find that our books could fill some of the gaps in their inventory—specifically with respect to poetry titles. We began donating books published by Milkweed to this organization in 2024 and remain committed to continuing this partnership to ensure poetry and LGBTQ+ related books are available to the readers they serve.

Since 1994, the Women’s Prison Book Project (WPBP) has provided women, trans, and gender expansive people in prison with free reading materials covering a wide range of topics from law and education (dictionaries, GED, etc.) to fiction, politics, history, and health. They are an all-volunteer, grassroots organization. They seek to build connections with those behind the walls, and to educate those of us on the outside about the realities of prison and the justice system. Learn more about this organization here.