BOA Blog

Sometimes technology actually makes things harder. You send the wrong email to the wrong email list and cause mass confusion. Or else a spambot does that for you about, say, 956 times, and everyone on the list emails each other to say how upset they are, thus exponentially increasing the amount of spam everyone receives. Or maybe you forget your passcode because you have 89 of them that control every aspect of your life. Or maybe you get dumped by your sweetheart via Twitter.  Oh the (lack of) humanity!  But then again, sometimes technology is very very cool. Say a book comes out by an author who...

[caption id="attachment_938" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Painter Steve Smock with BOA Editor Peter Conners and BOA Development Director Melissa Hall"][/caption] Q: What's more fun than watching an artist create a painting in two hours flat? A: Watching it speeded-up to forty seconds flat with time lapse video! Click the below link to check out Steve Smock painting during BOA's "Poetry Is Jazz" event on June 15, 2010. This painting will be auctioned off at BOA's annual Dine & Rhyme celebration on October 16th, 2010. It is signed by the artist and also inscribed with "BOA" and the date it was created. [Smock...

Ah yes, it's true, kids do say the darndest things. But in the hands of poet Naomi Shihab Nye, those "darndest things" turn into poetic observations with the power to remind our adult minds of the pure wonder - and insight - that children possess.  Here is Naomi reading her poem "One Boy Told Me" which is a "found poem" of insights given to her by her son as he grew up. The recording is from The Poetry Foundation's "Poetry Everywhere" video series and the reading is from the Dodge Poetry Festival. BOA is proud to have published Naomi's collections, Red Suitcase,  Fuel,  and, You & Yours. We are...

David Gura from NPR's "All Things Considered" put together a beautiful tribute to Lucille that was broadcasted last weekend. The piece begins: "As a girl growing up in the 1940s on Lake Erie, Lucille Clifton never thought she would become a poet. "The only poets I ever saw were the portraits that hung on the walls in elementary school in Buffalo, N.Y.," she said in 1993. "Old, dead white men, with beards, from New England." Clifton did not look like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow or John Greenleaf Whittier or Walt Whitman. She was a woman and an African-American, and later, a...

[caption id="attachment_575" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Bill Moyers Journal."][/caption] The tribute to Lucille by Bill Moyers was one of the most beautiful pieces on a poet I have ever seen. Lucille's readings are powerful, playful, deadly serious, and passionate. Moyers eloquently described the impact of her work and the combination of interviews, readings, and information about Lucille's career presented a well-rounded portrait of the poet. In his introduction to the piece, Moyer's said, "The long arc of morality that bends toward justice leads not only through the courthouse and the statehouse but out on the streets and in the pages of poetry...