Max Ritvo began as my student. I met Max when he was a senior at Yale. This is how he began his application to get into my playwriting workshop: Dear Professor Ruhl, Thanks for reading this application. My name is Max Ritvo—I’m a senior English major in the Creative Writing Concentration. All I want to do is write. His application said that he was a poet and a comedian, part of an experimental comedy troupe. A poet and he’s funny? Huh. I reread his application, which had been left to stew in the “no” pile because he’d never written a play before. And because funny poets are a rare and wonderful species of human being, I moved Max to the “yes” pile, despite his lack of experience writing plays. It is hard to imagine now that Max’s application could ever have remained in any other pile—a strange parallel universe in which I never met Max.
Our Blog
Bookstore / Roundup
This week marks two years since we opened Milkweed Books, our independent bookstore in the Open Book building. Here are this month's recommendations, in which four real people suggest good books we think you might like, too!
Authors
Max Ritvo was a prodigiously gifted poet; toward the end of his life, he was also volcanically productive. Nothing he wrote was without flashes of brilliance, but many of these late poems would surely have been revised or jettisoned; it was slow work to sift out the very best. This he asked me to do—it seemed to me an essential labor lest the weaker poems dilute the stronger. What follows, obviously, reflects my judgment. Nothing has been revised; Elizabeth Metzger, Max’s designated literary executor, suggested one minute cut. Cancer was Max’s tragedy; it was also, as he was canny enough to see, his opportunity. Poets who die at twenty-five do not commonly leave bodies of work so urgent, so daring, so supple, so desperately alive.
Authors / Watch & Listen
From the author of Bright Dead Things comes The Carrying, her most powerful collection yet. And now, for the first time, we’re thrilled to share Limón's entire collection in audiobook. Listen to a preview here.
Authors / Watch & Listen
What borders are really about, and what we do with them. The fullness of what it is to be Mexican (and American). A preview of Luis Alberto Urrea’s contribution to the forthcoming anthology Hearth: A Global Conversation on Community, Identity, and Place.
Authors / Awards & Prizes
Rick Barot, judge of the seventh annual Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, has selected Twin Cities resident Claire Wahmanholm to be recipient of the 2018 prize, for her manuscript, Wilder. Wahmanholm will receive $10,000 as well as publication by Milkweed Editions in November 2018.
Authors / Watch & Listen
North American Stadiums by Grady Chambers is the inaugural winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, and will be published in June 2018. “This book is in many ways a love letter: to the landscapes of the Midwest and Central New York that I have spent so much time in, to the histories of those places, to the people that I have moved through those places with. . .” —Grady Chambers
News / Awards & Prizes
We are pleased to announce the five finalists for this year's Lindquist & Vennum poetry prize, which awards $10,000 and publication with Milkweed Editions to the winning poet.
Authors / Events
2000 miles by bicycle, 64 days, 30+ events, 9 states, two authors, 1 canoe . . . and YOU!
Awards & Prizes
We are pleased to announce that judge Victoria Chang has selected John McCarthy’s collection Scared Violent Like Horses as winner of the 2017-18 Jake Adam York Prize for a first or second collection of poems, presented in partnership by Copper Nickel and Milkweed Editions. McCarthy will receive $2,000 and his collection will be published by Milkweed in February 2019.