Upon accepting the National Book Critics Circle Award, Ada Limón delivered a powerful speech about women and community. Read the full speech here.

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.

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 from...

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...