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One Friday afternoon this past May, I received an email from Martha Collins. She asked me to consider a manuscript by a young poet named Max Ritvo. Jean Valentine had selected his work for a chapbook competition, Martha explained, and Lucie Brock-Broido had selected some of the poems in the manuscript for publication in the Boston Review. Martha added only that there was some urgency, as an illness had thrust this young man into what would become the final stage of his life.

A couple months ago, we announced plans to open Milkweed Books—a new nonprofit, independent bookstore with big ambitions. At Milkweed Books, we’ll be selling our books alongside others published by our fellow independent and nonprofit presses, who, like us, are working to bring groundbreaking literary art to the marketplace.

We are pleased to announce that Chris Santiago is the winner of the 2016 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry. For his manuscript, Tula, chosen from nearly two hundred collections from poets across the Upper Midwest, Santiago will receive $10,000 as well as publication by Milkweed Editions.

A first-generation Filipino American, Chris Santiago is fascinated by the familiarity and mystique of language. “When I hear someone speak Tagalog, I recognize it immediately, but don’t know what they are saying,” said Santiago. “This feeling—of being outside the language, but having it also be a kind of homeland—is where Tula began.”…