Friends Lecture: Michael Kleber-Diggs
The Friends Lecture Committee presents “The Art of Poetry, the Voices to Hear,” an evening with award-winning poet Michael Kleber-Diggs in conversation with Daniel Slager, Milkweed Editions publisher and CEO.
Enjoy a thoughtful conversation about the place for marginalized voices in today’s publishing landscape. We look forward to welcoming these literary leaders as they share their expertise.
After the lecture, join us for a book signing.
Michael Kleber-Diggs is a celebrated poet, essayist, literary critic, and arts educator. He’s the author of Worldly Things, which won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize and was published by Milkweed Editions in 2021. His essay, “There Was a Tremendous Softness,” appears in A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars, edited by Erin Sharkey (Milkweed Editions, 2023).
His poems and essays often explore themes of intimacy, community, empathy, and grace, and document the many ways America systemically fails those who call it home while also calling upon our collective potential for something better. Kleber-Diggs’ writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Poem-a-Day, Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, LitHub, and The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, among other places. Most recently, he’s the author of the forthcoming memoir My Weight in Water, an intimate story of race and recreation in America—of segregation, desegregation, and justice—told through one family and their lives in the Midwest.
A 2023–2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow in Literature, Kleber-Diggs teaches creative writing through the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and at Augsburg University and Hamline University in the Twin Cities.
Daniel Slager is publisher and CEO of Milkweed Editions, an independent, nonprofit publisher of literary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He’s led the press to great success over the past 20 years. Prior to joining Milkweed as editor-in-chief in 2005, he was an editor at Harcourt Trade Publishers in New York. Before joining Harcourt, he was the associate editor of Grand Street, a leading quarterly magazine of literature and fine arts.
Founded in Minneapolis in 1980, Milkweed Editions seeks to be a site of metamorphosis in the literary ecosystem. Milkweed’s mission is to identify, nurture, and publish transformative literature and build an engaged community around it. To carry out this mission, Milkweed takes risks on debut and experimental writers, invests significant time and care in the editorial process, and enables dynamic engagement between authors and readers.
Over the past 45 years, Milkweed has published more than 350 books of literary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Their publishing of Black and BIPOC authors has centered voices that are often marginalized. Its Seedbank series gathers works of literature from around the world to foster conversation and reflection on the human relationship to place and the natural world—exposing readers to new, endangered, and forgotten ways of seeing the world. Its Multiverse series focuses on neurodivergent, autistic, nonspeaking, and disabled authors and cultures, working to lovingly exceed what is normal and normative in our society by questioning and augmenting what literary culture is, has been, and can be. In short, Milkweed Editions looks to bring different voices to the table for essential conversations aimed at ensuring a vibrant, diverse, and empowered future.