
Poetry at Milkweed
The Poetry Progam at Milkweed Editions
At Milkweed Editions we believe reading is life-changing, and our poetry program is no exception. From publishing the collections of U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón to our expansive Multiverse series to the many debut poets on our list, poetry published by Milkweed pushes the envelope for what poetry can do, connects readers with ideas and emotions that change perspectives, introduces new voices, and challenges the conventional concept that poetry is only for some.
In addition to increasing access, redefining nature poetry, superceeding expectations, and platforming new voices, poetry at Milkweed is exceptional because of the community of interconnected readers, writers, booksellers, educators, librarians, and partners that make it all possible.
2025 Poetry Catalog
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Winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, this collection of poems seeks answers about how to live meaningfully in a world saturated by late capitalism.
“The question isn’t / what exists,” writes Sarah V. Schweig in her engrossing and prize-winning…
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A ground-breaking collection of poems exploring disability, syntax, and rhythm from a Brooklyn-based Senegalese American writer with cerebral palsy.
Latif Askia Ba—an acclaimed poet with Choreic Cerebral Palsy—honors all the things that arise from our…
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A brilliant and lithe collection of poems making space for the resolve and hope of motherhood amid consumerist dreams and nightmares.
Consumerism—its privations and raptures—seeps into all aspects of contemporary life. “Who knows me / as the search…
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A tender and provocative collection of poems interrogating the troubles and wonders of both childhood and parenthood against the backdrop of global violence.
From accomplished poet Wayne Miller comes a collection examining how an individual’s story…
- From award-winning poet Chris Santiago, a far-reaching collection of erasures and original poems examining the long shadow of American militarism and imperialism.
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A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Big Reads Selection
A 2024 NPR “Books We Love” SelectionPublished in association with the Library of Congress and edited by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, a singular collection of fifty…
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A visionary collection of poetry advocating for the excited, the rebellious, and the neuroqueer.
In this momentous debut, Sid Ghosh invites the reader “to be so free that it scares you.” Leveraging gem-like koans, technicolor wordplay, and earth…
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Radiant with a tenderness that is only achieved through close attention, these poems offer witnessing and formalistic exploration as well as a unique cosmology that is made ever more expansive by blurred lines between the instructional and the…
- Longlisted for for the Griffin Poetry Prize Longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize
An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. -
Drawing from six previously published books—including widely acclaimed collections The Hurting Kind, The Carrying, and Bright Dead Things—as well as vibrant new work, Startlement exalts the mysterious. With a tender curiosity, Limón wades into…
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Traversing historical, terrestrial, and discursive limits, Devon Walker-Figueroa brings a chorus of perspectives, eras, idioms, and ideals into novel if not turbulent dialogue. In this dazzling second collection, bursting with detailed case studies…
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Jason Allen-Paisant has emerged in recent years as one of the most celebrated poets in the UK and across the West Indies. Winner already of the Forward Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize, his writing has been acclaimed for its artistry and the fresh…
A tender and provocative collection of poems interrogating the troubles and wonders of both childhood and parenthood against the backdrop of global violence.

Award-winning Poetry
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Jackson Poetry Prize: Fady Joudah
“Distinguished by his courage to speak in the face of the unspeakable, in poems of lyric concision and intensity.”—judges Natalie Diaz, Gregory Pardlo, and Diane Seuss
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MacArthur Fellowship: Ada Limón
“Ada’s work has enriched our relationship with the more-than-human world for decades. All of us at Milkweed are delighted that she has received this prestigious recognition and privileged to watch her star continue to rise.”—Publisher & CEO Daniel Slager.
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Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize: Ama Codjoe
“With every carefully crafted line, Codjoe challenges conventions, disrupts expectations, and expands the boundaries of poetic expression.”—judges Shane McCrae, January Gill O’Neill, and Monica Youn
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National Book Foundation Science + Literature: Claire Wahmanholm
“Meltwater is a collection of poetry that powerfully expresses what it feels like to live, love, and mother during a time of climate chaos… . This book brings together literature and science in a way that is innovative, emotive, and compelling.”—National Book Foundation Science + Literature Selection Committee
Poetry in Translation
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A masterful bilingual collection of poems rooted in K’iche’ Maya culture illustrating all the ways meaning manifests within our world, and how best to behold it.
- An authoritative volume representing the vast oeuvre of one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant and visionary poets.
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By turns poetic and lucid, sinuous and accessible, this verse translation of the Mayan epic—the first of its kind, and the first in the Seedbank series—breathes new life into an essential tale.
- A penetrating and encompassing English-language translation from the celebrated French poet touching on death, domesticity, nature, language itself, and—always—the body.
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The latest in the Seedbank series, the debut in English of a groundbreaking Indigenous poet of the Americas. Steely lyrics fuse cosmology, lineage, feminism, and environmental activism into a singular body of work that stands for the self and the…
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The North American debut of Tuệ Sỹ—poet, monk, scholar, dissident, and one of the great cultural figures of modern Vietnam—and a new bilingual edition to the Seedbank series.
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Acclaimed poet and translator Dan Beachy-Quick offers this new addition to the Seedbank series: a warm, vivid rendering of the earliest Greek intellects, inviting us to reconsider writing, and thinking, as a way of living meaningfully in the world.
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Translated from the Arabic and introduced by Fady Joudah, You Can Be the Last Leaf draws on two decades of work to present the transcendent and timely US debut of Palestinian poet Maya Abu Al-Hayyat.
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A bold, engaged new anthology spotlighting the work of contemporary Dutch poets influenced by international cultural exchange and linguistic invention.
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From celebrated contemporary poets María Baranda and Paul Hoover, an exciting collaborative translation of the canonical poems of San Juan de la Cruz.
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Spare, earthy, lovely, Stone-Garland offers readers of the Seedbank series its lyric blossoms and subtle weave, a walk through a cemetery that is also a garden.
Poetry Audiobooks
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Besaydoo by Yalie Saweda Kamara
Selected by Amaud Jamaul Johnson for the Jake Adam York Prize, Yalie Saweda Kamara’s Besaydoo is an elegantly wrought love song to home—as place, as people, as body, and as language.
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Worldly Things by Michael Kleber-Diggs
Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, the poems of Worldly Things offer needed guidance on ways forward—toward radical kindness and a socially responsible poetics.
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The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón
An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from U.S. Poet Laureate and MacArthur Fellow Ada Limón.
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How to Be a Good Savage by Mikeas Sánchez, translated by Wendy Call and Shook
From our Seedbank series of world literature, the debut in English of a groundbreaking Indigenous poet of the Americas. Steely lyrics fuse cosmology, lineage, feminism, and environmental activism into a singular body of work that stands for the self and the collective in the same instant.
The Multiverse series
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In this remarkable debut, which marks the beginning of Multiverse—a literary series written and curated by the neurodivergent—Hannah Emerson’s poems keep, dream, bring, please, grownd, sing, kiss, and listen.
- An intimate and kaleidoscopic entry in the Multiverse series that excavates survival, storytelling, and coming to terms with an unruly mind.
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A polyphonic new entry in Multiverse, JJJJJerome Ellis’s Aster of Ceremonies beautifully rewrites history, creating a world that blooms backward, reimagining what it means for Black and disabled people to have taken, and to continue to take, their…
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In The Wanting Way, the second book in Multiverse—a literary series written and curated by the neurodivergent—Adam Wolfond proves more than willing to “extend the choreography.”
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The newest entry in the Multiverse series Tressing Motions at the Edge of Mistakes is a debut collection activated by sampling, troubling, and trespassing.
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A ground-breaking collection of poems exploring disability, syntax, and rhythm from a Brooklyn-based Senegalese American writer with cerebral palsy.
Latif Askia Ba—an acclaimed poet with Choreic Cerebral Palsy—honors all the things that arise from our…
Frequently taught poetry
- Longlisted for for the Griffin Poetry Prize Longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize
An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. -
This National Poetry Series winner defiantly makes space for bodies that have been historically denied their own vocabulary. These poems stake a claim on the language available to speak about trans experience.
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This National Poetry Series winner is an unflinching portrait of the actual west—full of beauty as well as brutality, where boys tentatively learn to become, and to love, men.
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Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, the poems of Worldly Things offer needed guidance on ways forward—toward radical kindness and a socially responsible poetics.
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By turns poetic and lucid, sinuous and accessible, this verse translation of the Mayan epic—the first of its kind, and the first in the Seedbank series—breathes new life into an essential tale.
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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.”
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From U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón comes The Carrying—her most powerful collection yet.
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Selected by Sally Keith as a winner of the National Poetry Series, this debut collection is a ruminative catalogue of overgrowth and the places that haunt us.
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From the celebrated author of feeld comes a formally commanding third collection, dexterously recounting the survival of a period suffused with mourning.
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Concrete and evocative, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound is a testament to persistence, even when the body is not allowed to thrive.
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Uncanny, heartbreaking, and often surreal, this National Poetry Series winner is an unforgettable elegy for the people and places that have been lost to opioids in rural Appalachia.
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The poems of this debut collection are dispatches from chemotherapy beds and hospitals and the loneliest spaces in the home. They are relentlessly embodied, communicating pain, violence, and loss—and yet they are also erotically, electrically attuned…
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A final collection fully inscribed with the daring of the author’s acrobatic mind and the force of his unrelenting spirit. These poems brush up against the pain, fear, and isolation that accompany a long illness.
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Ama Codjoe’s highly anticipated debut collection brings generous light to the inner dialogues of women as they bathe, create art, make and lose love. Each poem rises with the urgency of a fully awakened sensual life.
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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.”
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Sara Eliza Johnson’s much-anticipated second collection traces human emotion and experience across a Gothic landscape of glacial and cosmic scale.
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Ask the Brindled is an intergenerational reclamation of the narratives foisted upon Indigenous and queer Hawaiians.
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Somewhere between elegy and memoir, poetry and prose, Ed Pavlić’s Call It in the Air follows the death of a sister into song.
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A boy asks his father what it means to die; a poet wonders whether we can truly know another’s thoughts; a man tries to understand how extreme violence and grace can occupy the same space. These are the questions tackled in these poems.
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In The Galleons, Rick Barot widens his scope, contextualizing the immigrant journey of his Filipino-American family in the larger history and aftermath of colonialism.
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Thrown in the Throat is a sex-positive incantation that retextures what it is to write a queer life amidst troubled times.
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This Jake Adam York Prize winner is a vivid portrait of the artist as a young woman. At every step, these poems seduce with history, folklore, and sensory detail.
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What is illusion—a deception, or a revelation? What is a poem—the truth, or “a diverting flash, / a mirror showing everything / but itself”?
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Spare, earthy, lovely, Stone-Garland offers readers of the Seedbank series its lyric blossoms and subtle weave, a walk through a cemetery that is also a garden.
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From celebrated contemporary poets María Baranda and Paul Hoover, an exciting collaborative translation of the canonical poems of San Juan de la Cruz.
Ada Limón
Jos Charles
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Bluest Nude by Ama Codjoe wins 2023 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize
Milkweed Staff — 09/19/2023We are thrilled to announce that Bluest Nude by Ama Codjoe is the winner of the Academy of American Poets 2023 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. This $25,000 prize recognizes the most outstanding book of poetry published in the United States in the previous year.
Codjoe has received a 2023 Whiting Award, a 2017 Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, and a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship. She is the 2023 Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim Museum. Bluest Nude was a finalist for both the NAACP Image Award in…
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Fady Joudah wins $100,000 Jackson Poetry Prize
Milkweed Staff — 04/18/2024“Distinguished by his courage to speak in the face of the unspeakable,
in poems of lyric concision and intensity.”Poets & Writers announced today that Fady Joudah has won the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize, which this year carries an increased award of $100,000. Given annually by Poets & Writers to recognize an American poet of exceptional talent, the prize is endowed by a gift from the Liana Foundation and is named for the John and Susan Jackson family. There is no application process; poets are nominated by a panel of their peers, selected by Poets & Writers, who remain anonymous. Those who have…
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Honoring Tuệ Sỹ
Milkweed Staff — 04/17/2024Milkweed is deeply saddened by the recent passing of Vietnamese Buddhist monk Tuệ Sỹ, whose poems we published in a bilingual edition last year as Dreaming the Mountain, with translations by Nguyen Ba Chung and Martha Collins. Born in 1943, Tuệ Sỹ joined a Zen order at the age of ten and later became an eminent Buddhist scholar, professor, translator, and poet. He actively resisted the idea that Buddhism should serve as a tool for any political agenda, and was well known for his dissidence.
Following study at the Institute of Buddhism in Nha Trang, Tuệ Sỹ moved to Saigon, where he became a…
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Celebrating the polyvocal launch of Tressing Motions at the Edge of Mistakes
Milkweed Staff — 03/11/2024On February 22, Milkweed Editions hosted a virtual launch event to celebrate the publication of Imane Boukaila’s Tressing Motions at the Edge of Mistakes: Poems. The book is the fourth addition to Multiverse, a literary series curated by—and devoted to—neurodiverse voices. Boukaila was joined by Multiverse editor, Chris Martin, who moderated the event, and four poets selected by Boukaila to “give voice” to their favorite poems from her book. The launch concluded with a dazzling “homing rally,” a collaborative poetry exercise open to all.
Among the many feats Multiverse has accomplished in the…
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The power of music and verse with stuttering poet JJJJJerome Ellis
Sean Beckford — 11/20/2023“A stutter is an heirloom—something precious, that should be cherished.”
JJJJJerome Ellis inherited his stutter from his mother, who also stutters. They don’t speak often of their shared inheritance but she is supportive of his work. He sees his stutter as an heirloom and his teacher—both in language and in music. He has learned to gracefully accept and even anticipate how it informs his artistic processes of speaking and performing. In his new book, Aster of Ceremonies, he creates a world that blooms backward, reimagining what it means for Black and disabled people to have taken, and to…
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Weijia Pan wins 2023 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize
Milkweed Staff — 12/19/2023Ibrahim BadshahWe are thrilled to announce that Weijia Pan is the winner of the 2023 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. His manuscript, titled Motherlands, was selected by judge Louise Glück and will be published in September 2024. In addition to publication, Weijia Pan will receive $10,000.
We at Milkweed Editions are deeply saddened by the loss of Louise Glück, a deeply generous and prolific member of the literary community. Glück worked closely with our team to select Motherlands, and with Weijia Pan to develop the manuscript. Her attention and care to this process is emblematic of her brilliance as a poet and her…
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U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón's Library of Congress signature project announced, includes anthology of nature poems
Milkweed Staff — 09/05/2023Milkweed Editions is thrilled to share Ada Limón’s signature project as the nation’s twenty-fourth Poet Laureate, You Are Here, which will feature two complementary initiatives: a new anthology of commissioned nature poems, and poetry installed as public art in seven national parks.
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U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón awarded 2023 MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’
Milkweed Staff — 10/04/2023Video URLWe are overjoyed and honored to announce that U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón has been awarded a 2023 MacArthur Fellowship, also known as the “genius grant”! The MacArthur Fellowship is an $800,000, no-strings-attached award to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential. Limón is one of twenty 2023 Fellows, including composers, scientists, artists, scholars, and more.
MacArthur Fellows Director Marlies Carruth highlights each Fellow’s dedication to the natural world in her announcement statement:
“The 2023 MacArthur Fellows are applying individual…
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Ava Nathaniel Winter wins 2023 National Poetry Series
Milkweed Staff — 09/25/2023We are thrilled to announce that Ava Nathaniel Winter has been named one of five winners of the 2023 National Poetry Series. Her manuscript Transgenesis was selected by poet Sean Hill and will be published by Milkweed Editions in August 2024. In addition to publication, Winter will receive $10,000.
Ava Nathaniel Winter is the author of a poetry chapbook, Safe House. Her poetry has appeared in The Baffler, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry International, Room, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She served as a Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University and received an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio…
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[...] by Fady Joudah is a 2024 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry
Milkweed Staff — 11/19/2024Please join us in honoring and celebrating […] by Fady Joudah, 2024 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.
“Fady Joudah’s […] scribes the elliptical seam between heritage and history into a sustained meditation on war, displacement, and love. Punctuated with the music of maqam in the marrow of its mission, this timeless collection illuminates an existential Palestinian struggle that rises to the universal through Joudah’s deft, querying verse.”—National Book Award judges citation
From the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize winner and one of our most acclaimed contemporary writers, this urgent and…
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Voicing grief: the language of elegy
Milkweed Staff — 09/19/2024By Melissa Kwasny
One of the first things I learned as a hospice volunteer is to think of death not as a medical emergency but rather as a spiritual event. After attending many deaths, including that of both my parents, I have learned something else: dying is a spiritual process, not a moment. It is a process not only for the person experiencing it but also for their loved ones who are left with grief.
Grief is universal. All peoples, and most animals, experience it. It is, paradoxically, also individual. We each suffer grief uniquely. It is perhaps our most dangerous emotion. People really do…
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Poetry: A Global Enterprise
Milkweed Staff — 09/19/2024Weijia Pan’s debut collection of poems, Motherlands, was selected by the late Louise Glück as the winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize in 2024. Among other things, the book is a transnational exploration of personal, familial, and cultural trauma, as well as the more universal trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic. Pan’s poetry draws on countless juxtapositions (of two countries, two languages, past and present, and national loyalty versus personal transparency), questioning “home,” nostalgia, and self-exile in order to express himself through the lens of a dual citizen. In the following interview…
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Four questions with Daywork author Jessica Fisher
Milkweed Staff — 08/12/2024How do artists work within constrictions of time? How can our existence be traced through art? How does writing ekphrastic poetry compare with linguistic translation? How is historical time considered with care in stretching both towards the past and into the future? These are some of the questions poet Jessica Fisher unpacks with her work in Daywork and in our Q&A below!
Milkweed Staff: Daywork takes its title from the giornata—the term in fresco painting for the section of wet plaster that can be painted in a single day. When did you first discover this concept? And what prompted you to use…
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Bo Hee Moon Wins the Ninth Annual Jake Adam York Prize
Milkweed Staff — 03/17/2025Photograph by Christopher ZeboANNOUNCING THE WINNER OF THE 2024–25 JAKE ADAM YORK PRIZE
Milkweed Editions and Copper Nickel are thrilled to announce that judge Matthew Olzmann has chosen Bo Hee Moon’s book Birthstones in the Province of Mercy as the winner of the 2024–25 Jake Adam York Prize. Birthstones in the Province of Mercy will be published by Milkweed Editions in January, 2026, and Moon will receive $2,000.
A South Korean adoptee, Bo Hee Moon is the author of one previous book of poems, Omma, Sea of Joy and Other Astrological Signs, which she published under another name with Tinderbox Editions in 2021. Her poems…