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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…

CREDIT ILJA HERB

Milkweed Editions is deeply saddened to share that Darrel J. McLeod passed away late last week after a sudden illness. He was 67. Darrel was an uncommonly beautiful and gentle soul whose stories about finding his voice as a two-spirit, Indigenous man moved readers across the globe. Along with his activism and service to Indigenous causes, particularly in Canada, his books brought forth vital stories of heritage, compassion, forgiveness, and hope.

“I am saddened by the news of Darrel’s passing, if also profoundly grateful to have called him a friend. He was an exceptionally beautiful human being.”—Daniel Slager, Publisher…

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…

Upon their return from the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Dubai, authors Diane Wilson and Erin Sharkey asked themselves: What do conversations about climate change mean for us as writers?

While our organization has nearly doubled in size over the last two decades, what we pay to our authors of books has grown tenfold. This is significant and by design—while we are selling more books, we have also prioritized author service as a key value here at Milkweed.

Milkweed is deeply saddened by the recent passing of Vietnamese Buddhist monk Tuệ Sỹ, whose poems we published in a bilingual edition last year as Dreaming the Mountain, with translations by Nguyen Ba Chung and Martha Collins. Born in 1943, Tuệ Sỹ joined a Zen order at the age of ten and later became an eminent Buddhist scholar, professor, translator, and poet. He actively resisted the idea that Buddhism should serve as a tool for any political agenda, and was well known for his dissidence.

Following study at the Institute of Buddhism in Nha Trang, Tuệ Sỹ moved to Saigon…

At Milkweed, we often discover great books in curious ways, and the Métis poet and storyteller Chris La Tray’s debut memoir, Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian’s Journey Home, is no exception. Nearly a decade ago, Publisher & CEO Daniel Slager attended a writers conference in Missoula, Montana. There he crossed paths with La Tray, who was hand-selling books at local indie bookstore Fact & Fiction. Their exchange morphed from pleasantries to serendipitous dialogue revealing that La Tray was writing a book of his own.

Later that evening, Slager learned that La Tray had recently begun interrogating…

On February 22, Milkweed Editions hosted a virtual launch event to celebrate the publication of Imane Boukaila’s Tressing Motions at the Edge of Mistakes: Poems. The book is the fourth addition to Multiverse, a literary series curated by—and devoted to—neurodiverse voices. Boukaila was joined by Multiverse editor, Chris Martin, who moderated the event, and four poets selected by Boukaila to “give voice” to their favorite poems from her book. The launch concluded with a dazzling “homing rally,” a collaborative poetry exercise open to all.

Among the many feats Multiverse has accomplished in the years since its…

As an Afro-Latina American citizen, I tend to seek stories that center voices, cultures, experiences, and lifeways historically peripheralized by the Western literary canon. But for all the breadth that I encounter still with every new BIPOC-authored book I read, I am routinely enchanted by a sense of what remains familiar. What lands have you been denied, what spaces have you been neglected in—and rejected from—and from what sunless places were you forced to grow? I ponder these questions as I read, acutely aware of the ways longing for BIPOC authors so often manifests on the page as a reaching…

Debra Magpie Earling wasn’t exactly surprised when her first novel, Perma Red, was banned after its re-release in 2022. She’d already faced more than her fair share of adversity bringing the book to fruition: after spending nearly a decade conceiving of the first draft, she would lose it to a cabin fire. After tirelessly working to rewrite the story, she’d be advised—repeatedly—to adapt the ending of the work to cater to Western audiences. And after finally signing her first publication deal in 2002, the imprint would shutter its doors and force the novel out of print just four years…