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...
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?...
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...
Chris Dombrowski is the author of The River You Touch: Making a Life on Moving Water. He is also the author of Body of Water: A Sage, A Seeker, and the World’s Most Elusive Fish, and of three acclaimed collections of poems. Currently the Assistant Director of the Creative Writing program at the University of Montana, he lives with his family in Missoula.
In the following interview, the famously personable hybrid-author made a stop in to the Milkweed Editions offices in Minneapolis, MN in the midst of touring for his new book, which has just been named a finalist for the Montana...
On the evening of January 27th, 2023, a few members of the Milkweed team ventured two hours south to the city of Winona, in the “bluff country” of Minnesota. As the sun began to set across the snowy expanse, we traded views of sparkling white fields for road-passes winding through hills and chasing the Mississippi River. Long before we arrived at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum’s Waking Worlds exhibition preview party, I’d begun to ponder what world we...
As Black History Month officially comes to a close, there’s a mixture of feelings clinging to the air. For all the symbolism and meaning that’s been supposedly infused into the whirlwind 28 days of February, there’s no denying the thin line straddling homage and gratuitous symbolism. For every well-meaning hashtag on social media used to call attention to an impossibly vast history, some corporation somewhere is transforming their Call-to-Action statement...
ANNOUNCING THE WINNER OF THE 2022–23 JAKE ADAM YORK PRIZE!
Copper Nickel and Milkweed Editions are thrilled to announce that judge Amaud Jamaul Johnson, has chosen Yalie Saweda Kamara’s book Besaydoo as the winner of the 2022–23 Jake Adam York Prize. Besaydoo will be published by Milkweed Editions in Winter 2024, and Kamara will receive $2,000.
Yalie Saweda Kamara is a Sierra Leonean American writer, educator, and researcher from Oakland, California, and the 2022–23 Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet Laureate (two-year term). She has received fellowships...
All of us here at Milkweed Editions are saddened by David Rhodes' passing, and profoundly grateful to have crossed paths with him. The six novels he wrote are among his greatest gifts, and we can think of no better form of reciprocity than engaging with his work.
We are thrilled to announce that Jackson Holbert is the winner of the 2022 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. His manuscript Winter Stranger was selected by judge Henri Cole and will be published in June 2023. In addition to publication, Holbert will receive $10,000.
Jackson Holbert was born and raised in eastern Washington. His poems have appeared in FIELD, The Nation, and Poetry. He received an MFA in Poetry from the Michener Center for Writers. He is currently a Stegner Fellow at...
Milkweed Editions is thrilled to announce that Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water by Kazim Ali has won the 2022 Banff Mountain Book Award for Environmental Literature. The prestigious competition awards $20,000 in cash each year, to be distributed amongst eight individual book category winners that are selected by “an international jury of writers, adventurers and editors.”
Northern Light is the story of a queer Muslim poet, son of political refugees from India, who
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