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Authors / What Matters Most / Watch & Listen

What Matters Most | Ep. 2 Su Hwang

Milkweed Staff — 04/30/2020
Video URL

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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…

Authors / What Matters Most / Watch & Listen

What Matters Most | Ep. 1 Adam Clay

Milkweed Staff — 04/23/2020
Video URL

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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…

Authors / News / Submissions

torrin a. greathouse Wins the 2020 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry

Milkweed Staff — 04/20/2020

Milkweed Editions is pleased to announce that torrin a. greathouse has won the 2020 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry. For her poetry collection Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, greathouse will receive $10,000 and publication by Milkweed Editions this December.

torrin a. greathouse is a transgender cripple-punk and MFA candidate at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of boy/girl/ghost (TAR Chapbook Series, 2018) and assistant editor of The Shallow Ends. In 2020, they received fellowships from Zoeglossia and the University of Arizona Poetry Center. Her work is published or forthcoming in POETRY, Ploughshares, …

Authors / Interviews / Watch & Listen / Poetry & Migration

Deep Cuts: Voice in a Time of Distance

Bailey Hutchinson — 04/09/2020

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. Oh, and real quick: this is Bailey Hutchinson, and I’m honored to be taking up the curatorial mantle for Julian Randall, the inaugural Milkweed Fellow, who created this series.

Friends, I’m feeling strange, and that’s in no small part because I’ve been alone in my apartment for over three weeks. It’s likely many of you find yourselves in a similar situation: self-isolation, while…

Authors / News

Rest in Peace, Tim Robinson

Milkweed Staff — 04/03/2020

Milkweed Editions is deeply saddened to report that Tim Robinson has died from coronavirus this morning in London. He was 85.

Robinson is the author of numerous books, most notably his two-volume study of the Aran Islands, and his Connemara trilogy, which acclaimed author Robert Macfarlane has called “one of the most remarkable nonfiction projects undertaken in English.” The first volume in the trilogy, Listening to the Wind, was originally published in Ireland in 2006, and we are incredibly honored to have released the book to an American audience last year in September. Robinson’s work reflects the multiple…

Authors / Editors / Interviews

Deep Cuts—The Making of an Anthology with Erin Sharkey

Julian Randall — 02/19/2020

Hello Milkweed True Believers and Happy February! For this month’s Deep Cuts series we have a special treat for you in the form of a new interview with future Milkweed author and co-founder of the Free Black Dirt collective, Erin Sharkey! This month we take an in-depth look at a forthcoming anthology of Black archival writing as relates to the history of slavery and freedom and migration for Black life here in Minnesota and in the wider country, how we reckon with what she deftly calls “the politics of nature.” It was an honor to sit a spell with Erin’s enormous vision for Blackness, history, the future, and what this anthology can and should mean to us, to all of us!

Authors

5 Reasons to Teach This Book—Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

Julian Randall — 01/10/2020

Happy new year to you and happy fortieth anniversary year to all of us here at Milkweed! This year of blog content will seek to highlight what glows about the past, present, and future here at Milkweed, and there’s no more fitting space for us to begin than with a celebration of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants!

Since its release in 2014, Braiding Sweetgrass has epitomized our mission of publishing and supporting superb work that is deeply in conversation with our natural world. With over 300,000 copies sold, Braiding Sweetgrass was…

Authors / Interviews

Deep Cuts—Sarah Ruhl and Max Ritvo’s Letters from Max: A Poet, A Teacher, A Friendship

Julian Randall — 11/27/2019

Happy December fellow readers, and welcome to another edition of Deep Cuts! In this series I have the privilege of diving in with the author of a compelling Milkweed title and discussing the behind-the-scenes work that goes into the composition and production of their book.

This month, we’re highlighting Sarah Ruhl and Max Ritvo’s collaborative book, Letters from Max: A Poet, A Teacher, A Friendship, which we released in paperback in September. We know this book has had an enormous impact on readers’ lives. Spanning four years of Sarah’s and Max’s lives, Letters from Max explores illness, art, spirituality…

Authors / Editors / Interviews

5 Reasons to Teach This Book—Hearth: A Global Conversation on Community, Identity and Place

Julian Randall — 11/15/2019

Welcome to our second installment of 5 Reasons to Teach This Book! In this new interview series, I’ll be investigating and straight-up admiring some of Milkweed’s titles via conversations with educators, authors and booksellers. Through this dialogue, we’ll expose the nuts-and-bolts of anthology curation and highlight some exciting pedagogical takes that will make your students want to steal this book from you. This month we are featuring Hearth: A Global Conversation on Community, Identity and Place, an anthology co-edited by Susan O’Connor and Annick Smith that we published in paperback this August.

Hearth’s table of contents boasts…