Blog Posts tagged with "Poetry"

Weijia Pan’s debut collection of poems, Motherlands, was selected by the late Louise Glück as the winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize in 2024. Among other things, the book is a transnational exploration of personal, familial, and cultural trauma, as well as the more universal trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic. Pan’s poetry draws on countless juxtapositions (of two countries, two languages, past and present, and national loyalty versus personal transparency), questioning “home,” nostalgia, and self-exile in order to express himself through the lens of a dual citizen. In the following interview conducted by Milkweed Editions, Pan opens up about the…

How do artists work within constrictions of time? How can our existence be traced through art? How does writing ekphrastic poetry compare with linguistic translation? How is historical time considered with care in stretching both towards the past and into the future? These are some of the questions poet Jessica Fisher unpacks with her work in Daywork and in our Q&A below!

Milkweed Staff: Daywork takes its title from the giornata—the term in fresco painting for the section of wet plaster that can be painted in a single day. When did you first discover this concept? And what…

Jocelyn Kapumealani Ng is my collaboration soulmate. As queer ʻŌiwi femme creatives, we both use art to uplift and ask better questions of shapeshifters. We return to our own bodies to make — and to make possible — decolonial love. A Hawaiian multi-dimensional artist, Jocelyn uses special effects make-up and digital photography to transform people into their own mythic figures. Importantly, her practice is based on dialogue and trust. She asks for your reasons. Why do you come to be transformed? Why this myth? Why this body? As I wrote and re-wrote Ask the Brindled, Jocelyn and I worked together to dig deeper into moʻo mythology, moʻo poetics, and queer ʻŌiwi femme approaches to art.

Hello Milkweed readers! I’m Mary Austin Speaker, Milkweed’s Creative Director, and I was honored to talk with Ama Codjoe this week about her extraordinary first book, Bluest Nude, which is due out in September 2022.

Mary Austin Speaker: Bluest Nude is a powerful, vulnerable collection of poems that explores the practice of seeing and being seen as well as the ways we move through intimacy, memory, and art. Can you describe some of the central experiences that inspired Bluest Nude?

Ama Codjoe: In 2019, I attended the art exhibit, Posing Modernity: the Black Model from Manet…

Welcome, friends, to the latest installment of 5 Reasons to Teach This Book! In this interview series, we examine what we can learn from Milkweed’s titles by discussing our books with educators, authors, and booksellers. This month, we’re delighted to feature an incandescent conversation between Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley and Milkweed Fellow Tijqua Daiker. Read on to learn more about Kingsley’s upcoming poetry collection, Dēmos: An American Multitude, out in March!

Tijqua Daiker: I’m endlessly intrigued by the poems in this collection that appear in the form of Punnett squares. It speaks to the science of identity, which has…

Welcome, friends, to the latest installment of 5 Reasons to Teach This Book! In this interview series, we examine what we can learn from Milkweed’s titles by discussing our books with educators, authors, and booksellers. This month, we’re featuring the 2020 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry winner, torrin a. greathouse and her debut full-length collection of poetry, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound.

Wound from the Mouth of a Wound is a deftly transformative text—one that resonates with prosodic brilliance. torrin’s formal variety is electric enough on its own, but combined with her stinging imagery and unreserved depictions of disability, physical…

We are thrilled to announce that Michael Kleber-Diggs is the winner of the 2020 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. His manuscript Worldly Things was selected by judge Henri Cole and will be published in June 2021. In addition to publication, Kleber-Diggs will receive $10,000.

Michael Kleber-Diggs was born and raised in Kansas and now lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. His work has appeared in Lit Hub, the Rumpus, Rain Taxi, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Water~Stone Review, Midway Review, North Dakota Quarterly and a few anthologies. Kleber-Diggs teaches poetry and creative non-fiction through the Minnesota Prison Writers Workshop. Worldly Things…

Hello, friends, and welcome to another edition of Deep Cuts. In this series, we’ll be diving in with some of our authors and discussing the behind-the-scenes work that goes into the composition and production of their books. This time around, I am beyond thrilled to be in conversation with the winner of the 2020 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Allison Adair.

Her recently-released poetry collection, The Clearing, is a hypnotic exercise in tangible language that verbs us through reflections on motherhood, on imagination, on desire, on flora and fauna, and more. Her poems ask readers to consider how close language…

Note: To view the closed captions, click the YouTube logo in the bottom right corner to view the video on YouTube. 

Welcome to the second episode of What Matters Most, a new video series by and for the Milkweed community. This week, poet Su Hwang invites us into her home and reflects on the ideas of interconnectedness and earthly wisdom that are comforting to her. Su also asks us to reflect on how we can sustain ourselves and each other through this difficult time—finding solace in the words of fellow Milkweed author, Robin Wall Kimmerer.

“When I…

Note: To view the closed captions, click the YouTube logo in the bottom right corner to view the video on YouTube.

Introducing What Matters Most, a new video series by and for the Milkweed community. Each week, one of our authors will reflect on daily nourishments in their lives — people, objects, traditions, places, plants, and more—that bring them strength, joy, solace, or peace. What Matters Most was born out of our collective acknowledgment that times of uncertainty cement the importance of the things—big and small—that give our lives meaning. For us at Milkweed, it is our community of…