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Authors / What Matters Most / Watch & Listen

What Matters Most | Ep. 3 Margaret Renkl

Milkweed Staff — 05/07/2020
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For the third episode of What Matters Most, author Margaret Renkl joins us from her backyard and gives us a personal tour of her “pollinator garden,” where she has intentionally planted seeds that serve as refuge and fuel for the bees and butterflies who traverse her home in middle-Tennessee.

“It’s really a great comfort—if we had to be locked in our houses anyway— that it happened in the springtime when there is so much new life and that is…

Authors / What Matters Most / Watch & Listen

What Matters Most | Ep. 2 Su Hwang

Milkweed Staff — 04/30/2020
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Welcome to the second episode of What Matters Most, a new video series by and for the Milkweed community. This week, poet Su Hwang invites us into her home and reflects on the ideas of interconnectedness and earthly wisdom that are comforting to her. Su also asks us to reflect on how we can sustain ourselves and each other through this difficult time—finding solace in the words of fellow Milkweed author, Robin Wall Kimmerer.

“When I…

Authors / What Matters Most / Watch & Listen

What Matters Most | Ep. 1 Adam Clay

Milkweed Staff — 04/23/2020
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Introducing What Matters Most, a new video series by and for the Milkweed community. Each week, one of our authors will reflect on daily nourishments in their lives — people, objects, traditions, places, plants, and more—that bring them strength, joy, solace, or peace. What Matters Most was born out of our collective acknowledgment that times of uncertainty cement the importance of the things—big and small—that give our lives meaning. For us at Milkweed, it is our community of…

Authors / News / Submissions

torrin a. greathouse Wins the 2020 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry

Milkweed Staff — 04/20/2020

Milkweed Editions is pleased to announce that torrin a. greathouse has won the 2020 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry. For her poetry collection Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, greathouse will receive $10,000 and publication by Milkweed Editions this December.

torrin a. greathouse is a transgender cripple-punk and MFA candidate at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of boy/girl/ghost (TAR Chapbook Series, 2018) and assistant editor of The Shallow Ends. In 2020, they received fellowships from Zoeglossia and the University of Arizona Poetry Center. Her work is published or forthcoming in POETRY, Ploughshares, …

Authors / Interviews / Watch & Listen / Poetry & Migration

Deep Cuts: Voice in a Time of Distance

Bailey Hutchinson — 04/09/2020

Hello, friends, and welcome to another edition of Deep Cuts. In this series, we’ll be diving in with some of our authors and discussing the behind-the-scenes work that goes into the composition and production of their books. Oh, and real quick: this is Bailey Hutchinson, and I’m honored to be taking up the curatorial mantle for Julian Randall, the inaugural Milkweed Fellow, who created this series.

Friends, I’m feeling strange, and that’s in no small part because I’ve been alone in my apartment for over three weeks. It’s likely many of you find yourselves in a similar situation: self-isolation, while…

Authors / News

Rest in Peace, Tim Robinson

Milkweed Staff — 04/03/2020

Milkweed Editions is deeply saddened to report that Tim Robinson has died from coronavirus this morning in London. He was 85.

Robinson is the author of numerous books, most notably his two-volume study of the Aran Islands, and his Connemara trilogy, which acclaimed author Robert Macfarlane has called “one of the most remarkable nonfiction projects undertaken in English.” The first volume in the trilogy, Listening to the Wind, was originally published in Ireland in 2006, and we are incredibly honored to have released the book to an American audience last year in September. Robinson’s work reflects the multiple worlds…

News

An update from Milkweed Editions

Milkweed Staff — 03/16/2020

Dear friends,

It is with concern and conscience that we have decided to temporarily close Milkweed Books. We have also decided to suspend all events through April. Milkweed Editions’ offices will remain open, but employees have been encouraged to work remotely if possible.

These are challenging times, and it is impossible to know how the days to come will unfold. We do know, however, that we owe our very existence—as an independent publisher and bookstore, as a non-profit organization, and as members of a multifaceted literary landscape—to our community. We also feel strongly that our top priority must be to…

Awards & Prizes

Kathryn Smith Wins the Fourth Annual Jake Adam York Prize

Milkweed Staff — 02/28/2020

Milkweed Editions and Copper Nickel are thrilled to announce that judge francine j. harris has chosen Kathryn Smith’s book Self-Portrait with Cephalopod as the winner of the 2019–20 Jake Adam York Prize.

Self-Portrait with Cephalopod will be published by Milkweed Editions in February 2021, and Smith will receive $2,000.

Kathryn Smith is the author of the full-length collection Book of Exodus (Scablands Books, 2017) and the chapbook Chosen Companions of the Goblin, winner of the 2018 Open Country Press Chapbook Contest. Her poems have appeared in Bellingham Review, The Journal, Mid-American Review, Poetry Northwest,…