Machine Shop
300 Second Street Southeast
Minneapolis, MN 55414
United States
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After two years of virtual events, we are thrilled to host Milkweed’s annual Book Lovers Ball in person again. Poetry Now: the Art of Connection will celebrate poetry’s breadth and power. Headlined by Ada Limón, newly appointed poet laureate, National Book Critics Circle Award winner, and host of The Slowdown podcast, and featuring a host of other brilliant Milkweed poets, the event also includes dinner, drinks, music, and a silent art auction.
Ada Limón
Ada Limón is the twenty-fourth U.S. Poet Laureate as well as the author of The Hurting Kind and five other collections of poems.
Michael Bazzett
Michael Bazzett is the author of You Must Remember This, which received the 2014 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, The Interrogation, and most recently The Echo Chamber. He is also the translator of The Popol Vuh, the first English verse translation of the Mayan creation epic, which was named one a New York Times Best Book of 2018. His poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Ploughshares, The Sun, and Best New Poets. He is a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and lives in Minneapolis.
Michael Kleber-Diggs
Michael Kleber-Diggs’s debut collection of poems, Worldly Things, won the 2020 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. He 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. Michael teaches poetry and creative non-fiction through the Minnesota Prison Writers Workshop.
Brian Laidlaw
Brian Laidlaw is the author of The Stuntman and The Mirrormaker. An accomplished musician, he has toured widely in the United States and Europe. He is a graduate of the University of Minnesota’s MFA program in poetry and is currently pursuing a PhD in creative writing at the University of Denver.
JJJJJerome Ellis
JJJJJerome Ellis is a disabled animal, artist, and person who stutters. JJJJJerome was born in 1989 to Jamaican and Grenadian immigrants.
Hannah Emerson
Hannah Emerson is the author of The Kissing of Kissing. She is also the author of a chapbook, You Are Helping This Great Universe Explode.
Adam Wolfond
Adam Wolfond is the author of The Wanting Way. He is a nonspeaking autistic artist, poet, and university lecturer whose work has been featured in multimedia exhibitions, documentary films, academic journals, and philosophical treatises.
An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón.
From U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón comes The Carrying—her most powerful collection yet.
From U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things examines the dangerous thrill of living in a world you must leave one day and the search to find something that is “disorderly, and marvelous, and ours.”