BOA Blog

BOA is honored to announce that the Lannan Foundation of Santa Fe, New Mexico, has generously awarded BOA a $35,000 grant in support of our Blessing the Boats Selections. Named in honor of poet Lucille Clifton (1936–2010) and her National Book Award-winning collection Blessing the Boats: New & Selected Poems 1988–2000 (BOA, 2000), Blessing the Boats Selections titles will celebrate works that continue Clifton’s legacy of writing to the experience of nonwhite women. Submission are open to all women poets of color in the U.S., including poets who identify as cis, trans, and non-binary people who are comfortable in a space that centers on women’s experiences,...

Blessing the Boats Selections will honor new poetry books by women of color Rochester, New York –– BOA Editions, Ltd. has named Whiting Award-winning poet Aracelis Girmay as the Editor-at-Large for a new publishing line to spotlight new poetry books by women of color. Girmay will select and curate the Blessing the Boats Selections within BOA’s American Poets Continuum Series.  Named in honor of poet Lucille Clifton (1936–2010) and her National Book Award-winning collection Blessing the Boats: New & Selected Poems 1988–2000 (BOA, 2020), the Blessing the Boats Selections will celebrate works that continue Clifton’s legacy of writing to the...

Rochester, N.Y. — BOA Editions is delighted to announce that The Tiny Journalist by Naomi Shihab Nye has been selected as the Poetry Winner for the 2019 Writers’ League of Texas Book Awards. The Writers' League of Texas announced the winners of the 2019 WLT Book Awards this morning in their newsletter. The Tiny Journalist is Naomi Shihab Nye’s fifth poetry collection from BOA Editions. It was named a Best Poetry Book of 2019 by The Washington Post and previously won the 2020 Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Best Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. The collection...

We are proud to announce that Documents by Jan-Henry Gray has been named a finalist for the Publishing Triangle's 2019 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry! The finalists were announced on Twitter this afternoon, March 16, 2020. Jan-Henry Gray's Documents was selected by D.A. Powell as the winner of the 17th annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. Rooted in the experience of living in America as a queer undocumented Filipino, Documents maps the byzantine journey toward citizenship through legal records and fragmented recollections. In poems that repurpose the forms and procedures central to an immigrant’s experiences—birth certificates, identification cards, letters, and interviews—Jan-Henry Gray reveals...

Rochester, N.Y. — BOA Editions has been approved for a $35,000 ArtWorks grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support the publication and promotion of eight new books of contemporary poetry. Overall, the National Endowment for the Arts has approved 1,187 grants totaling $27.3 million in the first round of fiscal year 2020 funding to support arts projects in every state in the nation, as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.  The Art Works funding category supports projects that focus on public engagement with, and access to, various forms of excellent art across the nation;...