BOA Blog

Happy Birthday to the great Lucille Clifton! We here at BOA Editions are thrilled to have been her poetry publisher for many years, culminating in last year's publication of The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010. A limited edition of the below broadsides were printed (and a handful are still available for sale) in honor of that publication. It feels like a fitting post for Lucille Clifton's birthday. We miss you, Lucille! For information on how to order a copy of this rare broadside, email Jenna Fisher at: fisher@boaeditions.org.

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...

Booklist (online) is calling The Era of Not Quite a "promising first book," which "jettisons as many fictional conventions" as possible. "Written in a plain style and using the flexible logic and tropes of fables, these tales wink at the reader in a sly, postmodern way, saying, in effect, 'This is the not the world, it is fiction, but how worldlike fiction is, and how worldly readers feel feeling real feelings about fictional worlds.' And Watson’s world is like a Möbius strip made of flypaper." The Era of Not Quite, just released by BOA in May, is chock-a-block with deaths,...

The Review of Contemporary Fiction is calling Aimee Parkison's The Innocent Party (BOA, 2012) an "accomplished prose," with "startling cinematic imagery." "In these newest stories, it is easy to get seduced as much by the sonic texture," says reviewer Joseph Dewey. "But make no mistake—Parkison is a storyteller, conjuring characters who harbor festering secrets, lurid urgencies, and violent compulsions. Like Joyce Carol Oates, Parkison deftly works the caricatures of Southern Gothicism into terrifying clarity." "Like so many of her generation, raised entirely within the reach of visual technology, Aimee Parkison, whose stories have garnered both critical praise and prestigious awards,...