The formative years of Milkweed Editions – a story told by its cofounder. In the 1970s and ‘80s, as major New York publishing houses were consolidating and growing ever larger, small nonprofit presses and journals emerged. With a variety of missions, literary, social, political, these small publishers shared a desire to prioritize quality over quantity. One was Milkweed Chronicle, the literary and visual arts journal launched in 1980 by writer Emilie Buchwald and artist R.W. Scholes in Minneapolis that would become Milkweed EditionsA Milkweed Chronicle is the first-person account by cofounder Emilie Buchwald of how the journal morphed into an award-winning nonprofit literary press. It is the story of writers who established Milkweed’s reputation for excellence in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction—and especially, by the mid-1990s, in books about the natural world. And it is also the story of the editors and staff who established and first achieved Milkweed’s mission of publishing transformative literature.
