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Excerpt: Antonio Michael Downing's Saga Boy

Antonio Michael Downing — 02/15/2021

What is home? The house you grew up in? Your hometown? Where-ever your family stays?

When I was 11 everything I thought I knew about home and who I was disappeared. I went to sleep in a rainforest and woke up in a blizzard. I moved from Southern Trinidad in the Caribbean Sea to Northern Ontario, Canada. My grandmother Miss Excelly, who was my whole universe, was gone. The way people looked and spoke, the assumptions they made, were all gone. My place in the world was gone. And everything that followed was a mad scramble to find a way back to a sense of belonging.

Saga Boy is my return back to that place. This is a memoir of my scattered family, of colonialism, of childhood trauma, of blackness, of placelessness, and of an old lady’s prayers living far beyond her life. I travelled through North America, shared stages with rock stars, took meetings with tech tycoons, and changed my name many times in pursuit of the elusive sense of arrival. And there is still a little boy inside me. He is still in the jungle, running through the bush, singing her songs, with a guava wood scepter and a hibiscus crown. This book is the alchemy of his experience. The saga of a boy returning home.

Antonio Michael Downing, author of Saga Boy: My Life of Blackness and Becoming

Authors / Poetry & Migration

5 Reasons to Teach This Book: Dēmos

Samantha Tijquanna (Tijqua) Daiker — 01/29/2021

Welcome, friends, to the latest installment of 5 Reasons to Teach This Book! In this interview series, we examine what we can learn from Milkweed’s titles by discussing our books with educators, authors, and booksellers. This month, we’re delighted to feature an incandescent conversation between Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley and Milkweed Fellow Tijqua Daiker. Read on to learn more about Kingsley’s upcoming poetry collection, Dēmos: An American Multitude, out in March!

Tijqua Daiker: I’m endlessly intrigued by the poems in this collection that appear in the form of Punnett squares. It speaks to the science of identity, which has…

Authors / Interviews

Deep Cuts—Deirdre McNamer's Aviary

Bailey Hutchinson — 01/04/2021

Hello, friends, and welcome to another edition of Deep Cuts! In this series, we dive in with some of our authors and discuss the behind-the-scenes work that goes into the composition and production of their books. This month, we’re excited to chat with Deirdre McNamer about Aviary, a brightly-plumed spin on a who-done-it due out later this year in April.

With senior residence Pheasant Run at its nexus, Aviary explores an extensive cast of overlapping lives—many of whom feel themselves forgotten. But McNamer invites us to slow down and appreciate the depth of these lives, to consider the mysteries that connect them. What we learn by residing…

Authors / Interviews

5 Reasons to Teach This Book: Wound from the Mouth of a Wound

Bailey Hutchinson — 12/08/2020

Welcome, friends, to the latest installment of 5 Reasons to Teach This Book! In this interview series, we examine what we can learn from Milkweed’s titles by discussing our books with educators, authors, and booksellers. This month, we’re featuring the 2020 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry winner, torrin a. greathouse and her debut full-length collection of poetry, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound.

Wound from the Mouth of a Wound is a deftly transformative text—one that resonates with prosodic brilliance. torrin’s formal variety is electric enough on its own, but combined with her stinging imagery and unreserved depictions of disability, physical…

Authors / Interviews

Deep Cuts—Larry Watson's Let Him Go

Bailey Hutchinson — 11/11/2020

Hello, friends, and welcome to another edition of Deep Cuts. In this series, we dive in with some of our authors and discuss the behind-the-scenes work that goes into the composition and production of their books.

We’re all about transformative literature here at Milkweed—y’all know that—but this month we got to see a slightly different kind of transformation: Larry Watson’s Let Him Go, a novel we originally published in 2007, transformed into a Focus Features film. What sorts of changes happen between page and screen? How might an author feel seeing a character they wrote find life (literally) in an actor…

Authors / News / Awards & Prizes

Michael Kleber-Diggs Wins 2020 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize

Milkweed Staff — 10/16/2020

We are thrilled to announce that Michael Kleber-Diggs is the winner of the 2020 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. His manuscript Worldly Things was selected by judge Henri Cole and will be published in June 2021. In addition to publication, Kleber-Diggs will receive $10,000.

Michael Kleber-Diggs was born and raised in Kansas and now lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. His work has appeared in Lit Hub, the Rumpus, Rain Taxi, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Water~Stone Review, Midway Review, North Dakota Quarterly and a few anthologies. Kleber-Diggs teaches poetry and creative non-fiction through the Minnesota Prison Writers Workshop. Worldly Things