Multiverse is a literary series devoted to different ways of languaging, curated by neurodivergent poet Chris Martin, and featuring a chorus of editorial voices. Multiverse primarily emerges from the practices and creativity of neurodivergent, autistic, neuroqueer, mad, nonspeaking, and disabled cultures. The desire of Multiverse is to serially surface multiple universes of underheard language that might intersect, resonate, and aggregate toward liberatory futures. In other words, each book in the Multiverse series gestures toward a correspondence—human and more-than-human—that lovingly exceeds what is normal and normative in our society, questioning and augmenting what literary culture is, has been, and can be.
“Just as literature can expand possibilities for being and knowing, neurodivergent writers with unique experiences of being and knowing can expand the possibilities of literature. In its attunement to many ways of languaging, Multiverse is poised to transform the literary landscape for everyone, opening the way for multitudinous paths toward creation, expression, relation, understanding, meaning-making—and ultimately, living.”
— Lauren Russell, author of Descent
“Queer poet Allen Ginsberg once wrote, ‘The message is: Widen the area of consciousness.’ The ambitious mission of Milkweed’s Multiverse series is to do precisely that by highlighting not just new and innovative kinds of writing, but ways of being in the world that have traditionally been exiled to the margins of human experience by the gatekeepers of the canon. To immerse yourself in the lively, passionate, fresh and always surprising voices of Multiverse is to restore your faith in the redemptive potential of language itself.”
— Steve Silberman, author of NeuroTribes
“When neurodivergent poets eschew the conventions of neuronormative writing and instead take the liberty of creating whatever neuroqueer languagings most effectively express their own lived realities, their words can act upon the reader like mind-expanding drugs. By providing a venue for such work, Multiverse is in the business not merely of publishing books, but also of unveiling hidden potentials of human consciousness.”
— Nick Walker, co-founder of Autonomous Press
