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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…

Introduction to Tim Robinson’s Listening to the Wind, a Seedbank series title.

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…

Dear friends,

It is with concern and conscience that we have decided to temporarily close Milkweed Books. We have also decided to suspend all events through April. Milkweed Editions’ offices will remain open, but employees have been encouraged to work remotely if possible.

These are challenging times, and it is impossible to know how the days to come will unfold. We do know, however, that we owe our very existence—as an independent publisher and bookstore, as a non-profit organization, and as members of a multifaceted literary landscape—to our community. We also feel strongly that our top priority must be to…

Milkweed Editions and Copper Nickel are thrilled to announce that judge francine j. harris has chosen Kathryn Smith’s book Self-Portrait with Cephalopod as the winner of the 2019–20 Jake Adam York Prize.

Self-Portrait with Cephalopod will be published by Milkweed Editions in February 2021, and Smith will receive $2,000.

Kathryn Smith is the author of the full-length collection Book of Exodus (Scablands Books, 2017) and the chapbook Chosen Companions of the Goblin, winner of the 2018 Open Country Press Chapbook Contest. Her poems have appeared in Bellingham Review, The Journal, Mid-American Review, Poetry Northwest,…

Real people suggest good books in our store we think you might like, too!

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!

Real people suggest good books in our store we think you might like, too!

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…