Milkweed Books
1011 S Washington Avenue
Minneapolis, MN 55415
United States
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Join Milkweed Books as we celebrate John James’s newest chapbook, Extinction Song, with a reading by the author. John will be joined by local poets J. Bailey Hutchinson and Claire Wahmanholm.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
John James is the author of two books of poetry, The Delusion of Being Absolute (Milkweed, forthcoming 2028) and The Milk Hours (Milkweed, 2019), as well as three chapbooks, most recently Extinction Song (Tupelo, 2026), winner of the Snowbound Chapbook Award. Recent poems appear in The Iowa Review, New England Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere, and his work has been supported by the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, the Academy of American Poets, and the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University. He is currently completing a PhD in English at the University of California, Berkeley.
J. Bailey Hutchinson is the author of Gut: Poems, winner of the Miller Williams Poetry Prize judged by Patricia Smith. A National Endowment for the Arts fellow, she works as a freelance editor and writing instructor in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Hutchinson is originally from Memphis, Tennessee, where she obtained her BA from Rhodes College. She earned her MFA from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, where she served as Social Media Editor and Poetry Editor for the Arkansas International and Assistant Director of the Open Mouth Literary Center. She teaches creative writing workshops through a number of organizations, including the The Loft Literary Center, and worked as an editor for Milkweed Editions. Her work has been featured by Ninth Letter, Beloit, Muzzle Magazine, BOAAT, and more.
Claire Wahmanholm is the author of three poetry collections, including Meltwater (Milkweed Editions 2023), which was a finalist for the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2024 Minnesota Book Award, and was a 2025 National Book Foundation Science + Literature selection. Her fourth collection, Cosmorama, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2028.
John James
John James is the author of The Milk Hours, selected by Henri Cole as winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he is pursuing a PhD in English at the University of California, Berkeley.
Claire Wahmanholm
Claire Wahmanholm is the author of Wilder, Redmouth, and, most recently, Meltwater, which was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Minnesota Book Award, and was a National Book Award Science + Literature selection. A McKnight Writing Fellow and the winner of the Montreal International Poetry Prize, she lives in the Twin Cities.
This winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize is an elegant debut that searches widely to ask what it means to exist in a state of loss.
A haunting collection that inhabits a disquieting future where fear is the governing body, “the organ and the tissue / and the cell, the membrane and the organelle.”