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As Black History Month officially comes to a close, there’s a mixture of feelings clinging to the air. For all the symbolism and meaning that’s been supposedly infused into the whirlwind 28 days of February, there’s no denying the thin line straddling homage and gratuitous symbolism. For every well-meaning hashtag on social media used to call attention to an impossibly vast history, some corporation somewhere is transforming their Call-to-Action statement into an opportunity for folx to buy merch that’s “trending.” Or maybe they don’t have a call-to-action statement at all, and they’ve done all the work they’d care to with…

ANNOUNCING THE WINNER OF THE 2022–23 JAKE ADAM YORK PRIZE!

Copper Nickel and Milkweed Editions are thrilled to announce that judge Amaud Jamaul Johnson, has chosen Yalie Saweda Kamara’s book Besaydoo as the winner of the 2022–23 Jake Adam York Prize. Besaydoo will be published by Milkweed Editions in Winter 2024, and Kamara will receive $2,000.

Yalie Saweda Kamara is a Sierra Leonean American writer, educator, and researcher from Oakland, California, and the 2022–23 Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet Laureate (two-year term). She has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the National Book Critics Circle, and Callaloo. Kamara’s poetry…

All of us here at Milkweed Editions are saddened by David Rhodes’ passing, and profoundly grateful to have crossed paths with him. The six novels he wrote are among his greatest gifts, and we can think of no better form of reciprocity than engaging with his work.

Milkweed Editions is thrilled to announce that Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water by Kazim Ali has won the 2022 Banff Mountain Book Award for Environmental Literature. The prestigious competition awards $20,000 in cash each year, to be distributed amongst eight individual book category winners that are selected by “an international jury of writers, adventurers and editors.”

Northern Light is the story of a queer Muslim poet, son of political refugees from India, who travels back to his childhood home in northern Manitoba to revisit the Pimicikamak people whose way of life was ravaged by…

Musician Jeffrey Foucault reflects on the his friendship with author Chris Dombrowski and the unique collaboration between friends that created the audiobook for The River You Touch.

An interview with author John Cotter about his forthcoming memoir, Losing Music.

We are thrilled to announce that Courtney Bush has been named one of five winners of the 2022 National Poetry Series. Her manuscript I Love Information was selected by poet Brian Teare and will be published here at Milkweed Editions in August 2023. In addition to publication, Bush will receive $10,000.

Courtney Bush is a poet and filmmaker from the Mississippi Gulf Coast. She is the author of the chapbook Isn’t This Nice? (blush_lit, 2019), and the full-length poetry collection Every Book Is About The Same Thing (Newest York Arts Press, 2022). Her films, made with collaborators Jake Goicoechea and Will Carington, have been…

Milkweed Editions is thrilled to announce that K. Iver has won the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry. For their poetry collection Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco, selected by Tyehimba Jess, Iver will receive $10,000 and publication by Milkweed Editions in January 2023.

K. Iver is a nonbinary trans poet born in Mississippi. Their work has appeared in Boston Review, Gulf Coast, The Adroit, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. They are the 2021-2022 Ronald Wallace Poetry Fellow for the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and the recipient of the 2022 Helene Wurlitzer Foundation Residency Grant. They have a Ph.D. in Poetry…

Haŋ (hello) Milkweed community, my name is Kachina Yeager and I am the Editorial Fellow here at Milkweed Editions. Our team is delighted to share with you the cover for Debra Magpie Earling’s forthcoming reissue of Perma Red—out August 2022. I was lucky enough to get to chat with Debra Magpie Earling about this remarkable novel, and I’m so excited to share that conversation with our wider community!