BOA Blog

For its July 2013 enewsletter on food, The Academy of American Poets asked some poets to share recipes for their favorites dishes and drinks. Since Summer is "the season of barbeques, fresh fruit, and culinary pleasures," and since "cooking, much like poetry, is a creative process," enjoy the recipe below that poet and translator Kazim Ali shared with the Academy: "Chocolate Peanut Butter Dairy-free Ice Cream." Kazim Ali is author of The Fortieth Day (BOA, 2008) and co-translator of the forthcoming Persian translation The Oasis of Now: Selected Poems by Sohrab Sepehri (BOA, November 2013). Image courtesy of www.poets.org.

Charleston City Paper recently interviewed BOA poet Jillian Weise on her upcoming collection, The Book of Goodbyes.  Rather than delve into poetic terms and techniques, the interview focuses more on how Weise's external stimuli--geography and a prosthetic--influenced her lines. Elizabeth Pandolfi begins the article by divulging the book's unwritten prequel: "Poetry isn't what took Weise to Argentina originally. She was there thanks to a Fulbright scholarship, which she was using to conduct research on a novel about Charles Darwin. She'd applied to the program after a love affair at the University of Cincinnati, where she was doing doctoral work, ended...

"How well can we ever know the place we live in—the house, the neighborhood, the city, the moment? Is it possible to comprehend the way light, history, pianos, hawks, desire, trains, cruelty, red, Ben Franklin, faith, and baseball intersect in each fleeting second to create a place and time so particular in details it will never be repeated?," asks Michelle Salcido in a recent The Rumpus review of Litany for the City (BOA, 2012). "In his award-winning debut collection, Litany for the City, Ryan Teitman attempts a delicate and ambitious mapping of the self, the city, and the infinite connections...

The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 (BOA, 2012) is a nominee for the twelfth annual HURSTON/WRIGHT LEGACY AWARD for Poetry, from the Hurston/Wright Foundation. "The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award provides annual recognition of published Black writers and those who contribute to the development of Black literature and to the support of the Hurston/Wright Foundation's mission." The winners of the 2013 Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards for Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry will be announced on October 25, 2013. "By honoring these authors, [the foundation recognizes] the profound significance, necessity, and genius of Black writers and the stories they tell." The Collected Poems of...

BOA author Douglas Watson, honored as a One Story debutante at the One Story Literary Debutante Ball in Brooklyn. Photo courtesy of Electric Literature. After a successful One Story Literary Debutante Ball last Thursday (June 6), the magazine's "best Debutante Ball yet," Electric Literature is sharing photos and a recap of the event on its blog. Described as "fancy," with its "ginger and gin cocktails, Dixieland melodies from the Blue Vipers, and ...elegant attire," the annual event featured and celebrated seven literary debutantes from 2013, including Douglas Watson for The Era of Not Quite. See the post by Electric Literature...