BOA Blog

The January/February issue of Poets & Writers magazine features their 6th annual "Debut Poets" feature. This section spotlights poets who have published their first collection in the previous year. We're thrilled that BOA's own Keetje Kuipers has been profiled for the feature for her A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize-winning book, Beautiful in the Mouth! Along with some fun "stats" (Time Spent Writing the Book: Four Years) Keetje provides some insights into her writing process: “I try to push the poem as far as I can before I pull the car over or borrow a pen from a corner bodega—I’ve inhaled as...

At the end of each year, the New York Times Magazine does a tribute to important cultural figures that passed away. The feature is called "The Lives They Lived." This year they included a beautiful tribute to Lucille Clifton, including rare insights from one of her daughters: “I’ve got some fox poems going around in my head,” Alexia remembered her mother saying, much as she had long ago, with her six young children playing around her, when she was inspired by something seen or contemplated and sat down at the typewriter at the dining table — or took the pen...

On Dec 6, 2010 the New Yorker published a list of the “Eleven Best Poetry Books of 2010” compiled by Dan Chiasson. We are thrilled to say that Cradle Book by Craig Morgan Teicher made the list! Chiasson calls it, “A touching book of fables and fairy tales you could read to a child, saturated with Teicher’s unusually gentle and weird imagination. I’m counting these as ‘prose poems’ mainly to get them on this list.” It's worth noting that BOA started our fiction series with the intention of focusing on collections that fall between the gaps of fiction and poetry. Cradle Book...

Come join us for BOA's Holiday Gala celebration on Friday, December 3! We will be eating, drinking, and having a grand ole time watching Rochester's own FuturPointe Dance company's interpretation of "The City In Which I Love You" by Li-Young Lee. FuturPointe's performances are extremely creative and their members come from all over the world. The company is known for fusing various genres and training, mixing modern and folk dance to Caribbean, African, Latin, and ballet, as well as for its aesthetic collaborations with visual artists and musicians. But for our party, the group will be performing a dance exclusively choreographed to the title poem from...

We are thrilled to announce that no fewer than 4 BOA authors have been awarded 2011 NEA Poetry Fellowships! Those authors are: Richard Foerster Aracelis Girmay Christopher Kennedy Cecilia Woloch Congratulations to our authors and all the other poets who received fellowships. The complete list is available here: 2011 NEA Poetry Fellowships BOA has also received a $30,000 NEA Access to Artistic Excellence award to support the production, publication, and related expenses for new volumes of poetry and short fiction. Scheduled authors include Naomi Shihab Nye, G. C. Waldrep, John Gallaher, Christopher Kennedy, Michael Waters, Janice N. Harrington, Ira Sadoff, and Adam...