BOA Blog

An insightful interview with co-editor Michael S. Glaser ran in this past Sunday's Edition of The Baltimore Sun, Lucille Clifton's hometown newspaper. In the interview, Glaser goes into intimate detail about the process of filtering, selecting, editing, and compiling the many poems of The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010. "If you've ever heard Lucille talk," says Glaser, "you know that she could speak about the African-American experience and being part of an oppressed minority without making a white audience feel attacked. Instead, you'd come away feeling, 'Wow, we're all in this together and trying to make a better world.'...

In this week's The Buffalo News is a glowing review of the new Clifton collection: "Editor's Choice: Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton." In it, reviewer Jeff Simon expresses regret at the lack of attention given to Ms. Clifton, a Depew native, from The Buffalo News during her lifetime, though also gratitude that so many elsewhere "loved and honored" and read her work widely, and took it "with utmost seriousness." The review notes the book's Foreword by Toni Morrison, in which the Nobel Prize-winning author challenges us to read more into Ms. Clifton's profound intellect and scholarship, rather than merely her...

Photo courtesy of poets.org. Craig Morgan Teicher's new collection To Keep Love Blurry is in the spotlight once again, receiving mention in a recent issue of Vanity Fair: "Feet firmly on the ground, Teicher nimbly employs an array of forms, villanelles, sonnets, and prose in To Keep Love Blurry (BOA Editions) as he explores the shrinking and expanding spaces between husbands and wives, parents and children." Teicher, along with BOA poet Naomi Shihab Nye, are featured poets at this year's Poets Forum in New York City. This three-day (October 18-20) literary experience from The Academy of American Poets is known...

"Lucille Clifton is the rare poet good enough to survive the Collected Poems treatment." According to Slate reviewer Jonathan Farmer, celebrating poets through Collected Poems can sometimes be an "awkward gesture," but we do it because we love those particular poets and their "human fullness." "Of course," writes Farmer,  "some humans seem more full than others, even in their poems, and Lucille Clifton was about as overflowing as they come." While the 'Collected Clifton' is the biggest book BOA has ever published, in every sense of the word, the Slate review notes the many "unique pleasures in encountering her over...

Photo courtesy of World Literature Today. It seems there are not enough words in any language to adequately praise Naomi Shihab Nye, who just claimed World Literature Today's 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature! While an important contribution to the world, her children's literature isn't all that is getting attention from the award. Ibtisam Barakat, the judge who nominated Nye for the award, said: "Naomi's incandescent humanity and voice can change the world, or someone's world, by taking a position not one word less beautiful than an exquisite poem. Naomi's poetry masterfully blends music, images, colors, languages, and insights...