Regular visitors to this blog know that BOA is celebrating our 35th anniversary this year. So it's only right that this year's Dine & Rhyme be an extra-special event! This three-poet reading featuring Keetje Kuipers, Aracelis Girmay, and Michael Waters will be Rochester’s most diverse and engaging poetry event of 2011. Issues of gender, sexuality, and race merge in the voices of three radically different poets all published by BOA Editions. Together, their poetic styles and life-experiences will grip and inspire everyone in attendance. The Dine & Rhyme will also allow attendees ample time to have their books signed and chat with these three amazing BOA authors.

Aracelis Girmay won BOA’s 2011 Isabella Gardner Award for her new book Kingdom Animalia. Born and raised in Southern California, with roots in Puerto Rico, Eritria, and African America; her previous poetry collection Teeth, was awarded a GCLA New Writers Award. Girmay has taught youth writing workshops in schools and community centers for the past ten years. She is assistant professor of poetry writing at Hampshire College and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Drew University in New Jersey. Girmay is also a Cave Canem Fellow and sits on the board of the Acentos Foundation.

Keetje Kuipers earned her B.A. at Swarthmore College, her M.F.A. at the University of Oregon, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She is the 2011-2012 Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College. In 2007 Keetje was the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. She used the residency to complete work on her book Beautiful in the Mouth, which was awarded the 2009 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and was published in 2010 by BOA Editions. Michael Waters has published ten collections of poetry, including five from BOA Editions: Gospel Night (2011); Darling Vulgarity (2006); Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems (2001); Green Ash, Red Maple, Black Gum (1997); and Not Just Any Death (1979). His book, Darling Vulgarity, was a finalist for the 2006 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He is co-editor of Contemporary American Poetry (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). The recipient of four pushcart prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Foundation, he is Professor of English at Monmouth University in New Jersey and teaches Poetry and Poetry in Translation in the Drew University MFA Program. The Details Sunday, September 18, 2011

3PM Poetry Reading & Book Signing (Gallery Auditorium, Memorial Art Gallery, 500 University Ave., Rochester, NY)

6PM Reception, Dinner & Silent Auction (Good Luck Restaurant, 50 Anderson Ave., Rochester, NY)

Tickets: Reading and book signing $20 in advance, $25 at the door.

Reading, dinner & silent auction $125 per person.

Your response is requested by September 9th, 2011.

RSVP to Melissa Hall via telephone 585-546-3410 etx. 11 or email hall@boaeditions.org

*Melissa Hall can also provide info on corporate and academic sponsorship packages (including ads in our program booklet). Please remember that tickets and sponsorships are tax-deductible.