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Happy October Milkweed fans and friends! I’d like to introduce the second blog series that I will be curating this year, which we are calling 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, I interviewed the inimitable Rick Barot around his collection of poems The Galleons, forthcoming February 2020. At once intimate and historical, The Galleons articulates both loss and life with always impeccable precision. I’ve been a tremendous…

Welcome to 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. We’ll get down to the nuts-and-bolts of anthologies as well as some exciting pedagogical takes that will make your students want to steal this book from you. While the title of this series is prescriptive, we hope that your engagement with the dialogue is organic and that you find entry points into the texts that align with your goals as a teacher, reader, writer, or literary advocate.

As the…

Jake Skeets writes about the cover of his debut collection of poems, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers (forthcoming September 2019), which features the portrait of his uncle, Mr. Benson James, taken in 1979 by Richard Avedon in Gallup, New Mexico.

Upon accepting the National Book Critics Circle Award, Ada Limón delivered a powerful speech about women and community. Read the full speech here.

Just released in the latest issue of Emergence Magazine is a new essay by Robin Wall Kimmerer, complete with an interactive experience including audio, parallax illustration, the most cosmological photos of corn you will possibly ever see in your life, stop motion animation with folded paper corn, and an interactive timeline.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.