BOA Blog

You know the feeling of losing someone? The feeling of being discombobulated as you try to navigate through the harshness of life when you no longer have someone or something that was so deeply rooted to your very being. d-sorientation by Charleen McClure is an ardent accumulation of poems that tackles the strong relations one could have with oneself, a mother, a lover, and a place. It’s sensual in some ways and heart wrenching in the rest. It shows the toll that caretaking can have on one’s psyche while also drawing in the bittersweet nostalgia. The lines in these poems...

Rochester, NY—BOA Editions is pleased to announce that Charleen McClure's d-sorientation is the next Blessing the Boats Selections title. Ms. McClure will receive a $5,000 honorarium and her manuscript will be published in September 2024 as part of the New Poets of America Series. d-sorientation was selected by Blessing the Boats Selections Editor-at-Large Aracelis Girmay from a pool of one hundred and seventy-two submissions.  Of McClure's manuscript, Girmay writes, "d-sorientation is a work of staggering beauty, intellect, and grace. Here, Charleen McClure takes up the wondrous, radical work of being in ongoingly deep relation with another. A mother, a body, a place, a lover. And so...

 India Lena González is a poet, editor, and artist. She graduated magna cum laude from Columbia University (BA) and received her MFA from NYU’s Creative Writing program. While at NYU she served as a writing instructor for undergraduates and received a Writers in the Public Schools fellowship enabling her to teach literature to middle school students via Teachers & Writers Collaborative. Her work is published in American Chordata, The Brooklyn Review, Lampblack, PANK, Pigeon Pages, and Poets & Writers Magazine, among others. A three-time National Poetry Series finalist, India is also a professionally trained dancer, choreographer, and actor. fox woman get out! is her debut poetry collection. She lives in...

Rochester, NY—BOA Editions is pleased to announce that India Lena González's fox woman get out! is the next Blessing the Boats Selections title. Ms. González will receive a $5,000 honorarium and her manuscript will be published in September 2023 as part of the New Poets of America Series. fox woman get out! was selected by Blessing the Boats Selections Editor-at-Large Aracelis Girmay from a pool of ninety-six submissions.  “This season, we received an extraordinary number of brilliant submissions for the Blessing the Boats Selections,” said Girmay. “The selection process was exceptionally difficult and I feel very honored and moved to have...

Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of A Tinderbox in Three Acts, which was published by BOA Editions on October 11, 2022 as a Blessing the Boats Selection, chosen by Aracelis Girmay. In her fourth poetry collection, Oka performs a lyric accounting of the anti-Communist genocide of 1965, which, led by the Indonesian military and with American assistance, erased and devastated millions of lives in Indonesia. Learn more about Cynthia's new book through this interview with BOA Fall '22 intern, Briar-Rose. Briar Rose: A Tinderbox in Three Acts contains poems, notes, interviews, "textual samplings'' from archival collections, and even drawings. What inspired you to...