A great book can reverberate far beyond the printed page. When Sara Fraker, a music professor and member of the Tucson Symphony Orchestra, finished reading Braiding Sweetgrass by plant ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer, she was alive with inspiration. She knew that what she’d read and learned in Kimmerer’s book needed to reach the widest audience possible, in a newly accessible way. So Sara commissioned composer Asha Srinivasan to write a 10-minute score for oboe, electronics, and natural sounds. The resulting piece, entitled “Braiding,” is an exciting addition to an emerging body of music concerned with climate change and deep ecology.

After finishing a book, some students write a book report. But the students at Nueva School in the Bay Area are going much deeper. Their teachers, Cristina Veresan and Cliff Burke, were so inspired by Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s World of Wonders that they decided to adapt their curriculum around its teachings. “Bay Area Wonders” is a project designed to help their 5th grade students gain a sense of place and nurture a deep appreciation for local biological diversity. Using the essays in World of Wonders as inspiration, each student chose a native Bay Area plant or animal to investigate. They then wrote essays and created scientific illustrations of their selected species, with beautiful results.  

Ada Limón was destined to be a poet. Her third collection of poems—the second published by Milkweed—was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Two collections of poems and seven years later, she would receive countless more accolades, including the invitation to become the 24th U.S. Poet Laureate, and the honor of being the first Chicana woman to ever hold the title. But the rest is more than just history—thanks to a recent collaboration “written in the stars” with NASA, it’s astronomy, too. Limón will lend her gift of exploring our connection to the more-than-human world to craft an original poem to be engraved on the Europa Clipper Spacecraft. The vessel will travel 1.8 billion miles to Jupiter’s moon in search of conditions supporting life in 2024, transporting the power of poetry beyond a nation and into the cosmos.

In life, Max Ritvo (1990–2016) was “uncommonly generous,” “profoundly perceptive,” and “beautifully empathetic.” Nowhere is this more apparent than in his debut collection of poems, Four Reincarnations, which was written during the final stage of an enduring battle with terminal cancer. After his passing, Milkweed Editions published two more collections of poems posthumously but vowed to create another way for the world to experience his everlasting legacy. Following a meaningful collaboration with Max’s mother, Riva Ariella Ritvo-Slifka, and the Alan B. Slifka Foundation, a prize was born in his name. Since 2017, the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize has helped propel the careers of exceptional emerging poets writing in the spirit of Max’s singular passion and ingenuity, with a $10,000 award and publication by Milkweed Editions.    

Many of our favorite books at Milkweed Editions have the power to garner the attention of avid readers, earth lovers, scientists, and policy-makers alike. Braiding Sweetgrass, the New York Times bestselling collection of essays written by Indigenous eco-biologist-turned-author Robin Wall Kimmerer, is a proud example. Just five years after its publication, Kimmerer was called to the world stage to share her indisputable, ancestral truth on the costs of environmental degradation, and the importance of gratitude and mutual flourishing. In her now-famous U.N. address, Kimmerer boldly illuminates the path forward in “the Age of the Sixth Extinction,” calling on humans to be more than consumers, to give gifts of our own to the Earth, and to claim “Justice not only for ourselves, but for all of Creation.”

In the all-too-brief infinity of Max Ritvo’s life, the prolific poet tested the waters of how many emotions words could hold in his work. Following his death by cancer at age 25, his friends, family, and colleagues alike worked to make sure his legacy would never be forgotten. This resulted in the posthumous publication of two seminal collections of poems, as well as a book of correspondence Letters from Max: A Poet, A Teacher, A Friendship, which was adapted for the stage by Max’s friend, mentor, and co-author Sarah Ruhl at The Signature Theatre in February of 2023. In what’s now been hailed by the New York Times as “a theatrical act of remembrance,” “a sacrament of grief,” and “also a comedy,” the story of Letters from Max: a Ritual renders a life re-lived, memories remembered, and the very existential questions of life and death a powerfully vulnerable and inescapably relatable search for meaning.

In the autistic, nonspeaking poet Hannah Emerson’s singular and lyrical debut, The Kissing of Kissing, words “keep, dream, bring, please, grownd, sing, kiss, and listen;” they also inspire. When composer Molly Joyce was commissioned by the Juilliard School of Music to write a new piece of music for the renowned soprano singer Mikaela Bennett, she instinctively knew whatever she created would be inspired by the words of a female poet, and it wasn’t long before she found and “fell in love” with Emerson’s work. The result was a moving and musical matrimony of silence and sound. Emerson’s poems were set to an original score and performed with a piano and a string quartet at Lincoln Center in tried-and-true testament to the ways powerful poetry can sing on and off the page.

When Priyanka Kumar began writing Conversations with Birds, she observed how many in our society have struggled to find fulfillment in the Information Age, and realized that the solution could be found in a single word: rasa (juice, or essence). For Kumar, this word was the key to discovering oneself anew; and to achieve this, one would only need to detach from the isolating grip of technology and embrace time spent in nature with its wisest teachers: birds. Since the book’s publication in the Fall of 2022, Kumar’s words have inspired readers across the country and beyond, leading to an invitation to speak about environmental and species conservation at the PEN World Voices Festival. And a team of Emmy award-winning filmmakers have been documenting her incredible journey ever since, with plans to feature the naturalist author in a docu-series—proving how the best stories don’t simply recapture conversations about birds, they create them.

Milkweed Editions knew they had something extraordinary in their midst when J. Drew Lanham approached their team with just twenty pages of a powerfully promising manuscript. Its premise: to boldly reclaim space within the world of birding—a field traditionally occupied by white scientists and enthusiasts—by tearing away at the often invisibilized boundaries between races, disciplines, and landscapes. Lanham is, by trade, a conservationist and ornithologist, but at his core he is a nature lover, an artist, and a Black native of Edgefield, South Carolina. It was precisely this multitudinous (and at times contradictory) identity that would propel his debut memoir, The Home Place, to take flight; Just five years after its publication, the world would catch wind of his soaring talent, leading to the award of the highly prestigious MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ in September of 2022.

Just ask Sophia Hall, seventeen-year-old Youth Poet Laureate of Washington, DC, who embraced the genre while reading a collection of poems for a class assignment. When asked to think back to a single poet whose words inspired her to transform her love of language from a creative outlet to a way of living, her answer was unhesitating. It was Ada Limón’s poem, “A New National Anthem,” that moved Sophia to write and submit a response poem to a national contest. It would not only sweep the first place prize, but also inspire a workshop on resistance and response poetry, as well as a new anthology calling teen poets nationwide to write their own anthems. Months later, Sophia was selected as a 2023 Presidential Scholar, which she envisions as an opportunity to “promote joy, literacy, and the love of learning to future scholars of all backgrounds…And to show people that you can write brilliant poetry at age ninety or age nine.”  

Debra Magpie Earling wasn’t exactly shocked when she learned that her first novel, Perma Red, had been banned after its republication in 2022. She’d already faced plenty of adversity bringing the book to fruition, from being advised to adapt its original ending to cater to Western audiences, to signing her first publication deal in 2002 only for the imprint to shutter its doors just four years later. But Earling was determined to stick by her work, which sheds urgent light on missing and murdered Indigenous women. And despite increased efforts by some politicians to silence the narratives challenging American revisionist histories, Perma Red still rose to bestseller status, with plans for its adaptation into film in the works to reach new audiences, and to return its crucial message to the underserved communities it is rooted in. “The time is now for [these] stories to rise up,” Earling says, “for us to change this narrative and open up the door to let native people tell their own stories in powerful ways.”