Emilie Buchwald

A Milkweed Chronicle: The Formative Years of a Literary Nonprofit Press Emilie Buchwald

The formative days 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-a city experiencing significant growth in the arts-that would become Milkweed Editions.


A 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.