BOA Blog

We are pleased to announce that Derrick Austin is the winner of the 14th annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize for his collection Trouble the Water! The collection was selected from nearly 500 manuscript submissions by National Book Award-winning poet Mary Szybist. Austin will receive a $1,500 honorarium and book publication by BOA Editions, Ltd. in spring 2016 within the A. Poulin, Jr. New Poets of America series. Of the winning collection, Mary Szybist says, “‘Expect poison of the standing water,’ Blake warned, highlighting the dangers of imaginative stagnation. I’m now tempted to believe that Blake himself has sent us...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_7caUiJLzk&feature=youtu.be (Nickole Brown and Jessica Jacobs read from their new books at Iowa City's Prairie Lights Bookstore | Video courtesy of Poets & Writers) In a recent Arkansas Times interview with BOA's Nickole Brown (Fanny Says, 2015), and her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs, the poetry power couple discuss "their books, their writing lives, and the future." Both of them women, writers, and professors of writing, Brown and Jacobs dive into their shared creative experience of the difficulties they face writing during the semester: "As a professor, my first obligation is to my students," says Brown, "and if I give them what...

Nickole Brown's new collection Fanny Says, has been bright in the recent spotlight, and for good reason. Receiving a starred review from Library Journal, Brown's second collection "tells the story, without sentimentality or cliché, of her grandmother Fanny," and does so "in a voice that is both authentic and colloquial." "At the heart of these lyric hybrids (epistolaries, monologs, and other poetic celebrations) is language, the language of communication, the language of shared heritage," says Library Journal.  "These are poems of survival—and sometimes advice. It’s rare to find a book of poems that reads like a well-plotted page-turner, each poem...

In a recent review on authors' first books, Poet Lore takes a close look at Robert Thomas' new fiction book Bridge. Although Thomas has published previous works of poetry, Bridge is his first published work of fiction. "First books offer the promise of freshness, innovation, and surprise ... It's a rite of passage, that debut, and for a reader it can be a delight," says reviewer Mary-Sherman Willis. "The speaker is Alice, in her early thirties, a legal secretary in a San Francisco law firm (as is Thomas), with an obsessive crush on a married co-worker, David, and a paranoid...

Renowned Israeli poet Erez Bitton is the 2015 recipient of the Israel Prize in Literature. Bitton, whose bilingual translation You Who Cross My Path is forthcoming from BOA Editions in fall 2015, is the first poet of Mizrahi descent to win this prestigious prize, known widely as the Israeli Nobel Prize. “The five books of poetry [Bitton] published... are the epitome of courageous dealings,” wrote the Israel Prize committee, “sensitive and deep with a wide range of personal and collective experiences centered around the pain of migration, planting roots in the country and the reestablishment of the Mizrahi identity as an...