BOA Blog

More news for Naomi Shihab Nye's Transfer! The Arab American National Museum (AANM) will honor Nye with the 2012 Arab American Book Award's "Honorable Mention for Poetry" on Saturday, September 29th in Dearborn, Michigan. The AANM, an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., is a non-profit human services and cultural organization committed to the preservation and presentation of Arab American history, culture, and contributions. Their unique national literary competition was created to draw attention to books "that preserve and advance the understanding, knowledge, and resources of the Arab American community by celebrating the thoughts and lives of Arab...

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="author photo courtesy of doriannelaux.com"][/caption] It's official! This year's A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize will be judged by Dorianne Laux, BOA poet and author of five widely-circulated collections. Over the course of her literary career, Laux has received two Best American Poetry Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, two Fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work has been selected for a variety of anthologies including the Best of APR, the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, and the Best of the Net, and has been translated into nine languages. Laux has also...

In a recent interview with Matthew Guenette for Southern Indiana Review, poet Michael Waters discussed his own stylistic progression and some of the factors that he feels influence his writing. When asked about the evolution of his own aesthetic, Waters stressed that structurally, he has moved from loose free verse to a style that centers "more and more on the integrity of the line... One reason I haven't attempted much prose fiction is that the sentence as an integral unit interests me much less than the line does." The line, Waters continues, is an essential, complete component of the poem,...

"Have you noticed how clean and glistening the cobblestones are after the rain? Real works of art! And flowers? No words can describe them. One can only exclaim “AH!” in admiration. You must learn to understand the ‘AH!” of things.” --Matsuo Basho [caption id="attachment_1786" align="alignleft" width="250" caption="author photo courtesy of jacketmagazine.com"][/caption] In the writings of 17th century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho, poetry exists as  a process of recognition and transformation: of Oku no Hosomichi, "the narrow path to the interior" that is accessed through the subtle, delicate experiences rooting us to the present. No better exploration of these experiences can...

[caption id="attachment_1778" align="alignleft" width="250" caption="author photo courtesy of citylightspodcast.com"][/caption] Together with renowned poets Jane Hirshfield and Mira Rosenthal,  Litany for the City author Ryan Teitman participated in a Live! From City Lights poetry reading this past April, and the podcast is now available and ready for your ears! Litany for the City was selected as the winner of the 10th annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize from over 600 manuscripts by Hirshfield herself, who has written six previous collections of poetry and has been celebrated by the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the Academy of American Poets, and the National Endowment for the...