Our Blog

Khaled Mattawa, judge of the Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, has selected Patrick Johnson to be recipient of the 2019 prize for his manuscript Gatekeeper.

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.

We are pleased to announce that judge Mark Doty has selected Brooke Matson’s collection In Accelerated Silence as winner of the next Jake Adam York Prize, presented in partnership by Copper Nickel and Milkweed Editions. Matson will receive $2,000 and her collection will be published by Milkweed in February 2020.

Our staff is constantly deep in the weeds of all the news about our books—what’s new or coming soon, new conversations about books published years ago—and if you aren’t constantly on the lookout, it might be easy to miss what’s happening in all corners of the literary internet. Enter this new series, in which our staff rounds up the latest not-to-be-missed Milkweed highlights.

Four real people suggest good books we think you might like, too.

Happy New Year, everyone! Technically, there really isn’t a “slow period” for our to-be-read piles—they are always towering, we always have blurbs that need to be submitted, it seems like the next round of staff picks looms just around the corner. All of it rolls over from one day to the next. Nonetheless, January feels like a time to start fresh, and to set the tone for 2019 with the first few reads of the year. The books selected here are our attempt to get kick off this year in reading on the right foot, including a graphic novel about food and heritage, sage advice…

Welcome to our Book Bundle series! Authors we love choose three of their favorite titles, we bundle them up nicely, and your to-be-read pile flourishes. This round of recommended reading comes from Minneapolis’s own Peter Geye, novelist and winner of the 2017 Minnesota Book Award in Fiction. See what Peter has to say about these three books he loves!

When the time came to make our year-end lists, we decided against developing a unified theory of list-making—we couldn’t agree on what the parameters should be, and it didn’t seem much like our style anyway. So instead, each bookseller came up with their own selection of the best books they read in 2018, free of constraints. Out of the staggering number of brilliant books read and published this year, we carved out these four lists: one minimal, one medium, and two maximal, with a vast range of genre, style, and perspectives across them all. We’re grateful to have spent the year buried in stacks of books we’re…

Milkweed Editions is pleased to announce that the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, the largest regional poetry prize in the country, will continue under a new name, the Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry. The prize will also offer expanded eligibility, adding Michigan to the list of eligible states of residence for entrants in the upper Midwest. The 2019 judge will be acclaimed poet, essayist, and literary translator, Khaled Mattawa.