BOA Blog

The Readers Review recently posted an interview with BOA Author Anne Germanacos in which Germanacos discusses her new book In the Time of the Girls.  Interviewer Mary Ellen Hannibal, who calls the book "a work you must give yourself to in order to sit with at all," asks Germanacos about her non-linear style and her themes that cross boundaries. When questioned about the references the work makes to "drastic painful experiences that are particularly female," Germanacos responds, "None of my characters have dodged pain.  To have done so would mean that they'd dodged life, and what kind of story would that be?!"    Read the full interview here The Readers Review...

Should you be heading to Washington, DC this week for AWP, please make sure to join us for a tribute to Lucille Clifton, celebrated writer and educator. KC Culver, Michael S. Glaser, Theresa Sotto, Jayme McLellan, Lauri Watkins will make up a panel to honor Lucille Clifton, not only as an author of international importance, but also as mentor and colleague. Lucille enjoyed a long career sharing her light with faculty, undergraduates, and graduates. Participants will discuss her compelling presence, her teaching and writing methods, and her influence on us as students, teachers, and human beings. We will also explore...

In an interview with 3AM Magazine,  Ales Steger, called "simply one of the most enjoyable poets to read in Europe right now," answers questions about his poetic style, his influences, and his titles.  Steger has published 4 books of poetry in the past 15 years, his most recent being The Book of Things. When asked about his style, which is called distinct and exact, Steger responds, "There are different kinds of exactness and different goals that could be acheived through attempts at precision.  Although rational, my poetry is not preoccupied with highlighting exact logical procedures.  Rather, it aims at throwing light at...

On Beloit Poetry Journal Poet's Forum, BOA Author Janice Harrington explains the inspiration behind her piece "Why, Oh Why, the Doily?"  She walks us from her early drafts in 2004 to the "springboard" Selden Rodman provided in Horace Pippen:  A Negro Painter in America. "I knew I wanted a poem that enacted obsession, wanted to crochet a poem (links, chains, intertwining, dropped stitches) that moved from the specifics of family history and memory toward more abstract representations." She then goes on to give an analysis of each section of her work, starting with section one, which "begins with a memory:  a woman crocheting beside the front window of her living room. ...

BOA fiction author Anne Germanacos (In the Time of the Girls) appeared on KPFK, Pacifica Radio for Southern California and you can hear it online here: www.kpfk.org Here's what the station had to say about the show: "8 PM on KPFK, Pacifica Radio for Southern California: The fragmented-seeming narratives written by my guest this week offer at first individual voices and epigrammatic lines suggesting ancient inscription, references to classical mythology. A schematic almost for storytelling itself, bigger stories accumulate and culminate in an adding up of the sum of parts. The individual sections of stories in Anne Germanacos’s In the...