Robin Wall Kimmerer didn’t set out to change the world—or even to become particularly famous within the canon of environmental literature, which was infamously comprised of homogeneously white voices for decades. Rather, the Indigenous ecologist-turned-author seemed to be operating like a scientist from the outset: her observations led her to understand that the world needed a change, and so she proposed an effective solution. In the face of ongoing biodiversity loss and climate change, Kimmerer observed that scientists had the tools to enact necessary change, but Indigenous communities held the spirit and ancestral knowledge vital to doing so with dignity...
Our Blog
199 Posts
Authors / News / Awards & Prizes
We are thrilled to announce that Bluest Nude by Ama Codjoe is the winner of the Academy of American Poets 2023 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. This $25,000 prize recognizes the most outstanding book of poetry published in the United States in the previous year.
Codjoe has received a 2023 Whiting Award, a 2017 Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, and a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship. She is the 2023 Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim Museum. Bluest Nude was a finalist for both the NAACP Image Award in Outstanding Poetry...
Authors / News
Milkweed Editions is thrilled to share Ada Limón’s signature project as the nation’s twenty-fourth Poet Laureate, You Are Here, which will feature two complementary initiatives: a new anthology of commissioned nature poems, and poetry installed as public art in seven national parks.
News / Bookstore
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,...
Interviews
On Thursday, September 29 of 2023, Ada Limón was inaugurated as the 24th U.S. Poet Laureate at the Library of Congress. Milkweed Editions was represented there by CEO & Publisher Daniel Slager, and as luck would have it, he would soon learn he was standing in the room amidst another future poet laureate who had dedicated her life to showcasing the power of the written—and spoken—word. Enter seventeen-year-old Sophia Hall, a devoted fan of Ada's, brought to the ceremony by her mother for a chance to experience the magic of the new poet laureate's charismatic-yet-commanding voice. By chance, the pair...
News / Interviews
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...
Authors / News
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...
Authors / What Matters Most
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 that gave rise...
Authors / What Matters Most
“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...
Authors / Interviews
FAF2DBD4-A96B-40DB-9D52-83124C08318E.jpeg
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...