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

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 Minn...