BOA Blog

Rochester, N.Y. — BOA Editions is excited to announce that Holy Moly Carry Me by Erika Meitner is a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) announced the thirty-one finalists for all six NBCC Awards categories on their website this morning, January 22, 2019. “I'm thrilled that Holy Moly Carry Me was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry and am grateful to all the book critics on the Board,” said Meitner. “It's an amazing thing to know that a book that was born out of very specific personal circumstances and...

Rochester, N.Y. — BOA Editions is proud to announce that Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is the winner of the 2019 Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA) New Writers Award in Poetry for his debut collection Cenzontle (BOA Editions, 2018). GLCA’s judges prased the collection with the following statement: “Castillo’s narrative itself couldn’t be more timely and significant: it’s a story of undocumented immigrants, border crossing, transgression, and the tantalizing fictions and facts of the American dream. From the opening poem, one is immediately drawn into the lush, honed music of these lines, which imaginatively translate states of dislocation, high anxiety, grief, and...

Rochester, N.Y. — BOA Editions is thrilled to announce that Holy Moly Carry Me by Erika Meitner won the 2018 National Jewish Book Award for Poetry. Jewish Book council announced the winners of the sixty-eight annual National Jewish Book Awards on their website this morning, January 9, 2019. Holy Moly Carry Me, Meitner's fifth poetry collection, plumbs human resilience and grit in the face of disaster, loss, and uncertainty. Her narrative poems take readers into the heart of southern Appalachia—its highways and strip malls, its fragility and danger—as the speaker wrestles with racial tensions, religious identity, gun violence, raising children, and the anxieties of...

Hello readers! Every week, BOA's staff and interns share one of our favorite poems from our over 300 collections of poetry. This week's poem is from The Smoke of Horses by Charles Rafferty, which was recently named as a finalist for the 2018 Connecticut Book Awards. Reflection I followed a creek’s quarter mile of crashing over rocks and algae andthe blurred darting of minnows, until it paused at a pool so well-stoppedit looked more like air than water: a sky of contrails, clod-shaped hunksof cumulus. I stepped in and saw the presence of my body disrupt theheavens at my feet. I couldn’t find the...

BOA is thrilled to share the news that Naomi Shihab Nye has won the prestigious Lon Tinkle Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Texas Institute of Letters. This is the highest honor given by the TIL, which was established in 1936 to recognize and celebrate Texas's literary artists.In the Texas Institute of Letters's official press release, TIL President Carmen Tafolla calls Naomi Shihab Nye “a significant world voice, utilizing poetry to tie tightly the bonds of humanity.” Nye's forthcoming BOA collection, The Tiny Journalist (BOA, April 2019), continues to advocate for peaceful communication across all boundaries. Inspired by the story of Janna Tamimi, the “Youngest...