BOA Blog

PBS Newshour ran a feature of BOA poet Hugh Martin this week, for his recent win of The Iowa Review's first-ever Jeff Sharlet Memorial Award. Already making big waves in the literary world since winning the 11th Annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, Martin won the inaugural award out of an entry pool of 265. The prize is only open to active duty military personnel and veterans and was judged this year by Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Olen Butler; the prize includes a $1,000 award and publication in the journal. Having spent 11 months in Iraq, Martin's poems capture "his war...

BOA poet Ira Sadoff is finishing up his week's bout of poetry readings tonight at 7 p.m. during the opening of the University of Dayton's LitFest 2013. A busy poet, Sadoff also had a reading just last night at the University of Indiana at Bloomington. The University of Dayton's annual LitFest event is a time when writers, poets, and musicians from around the globe come to the university's campus to participate in workshops, live readings, lectures, book signings, coffee-house style musical performances, and an "always-popular" poetry slam. Sadoff will open the annual event with a poetry reading of his latest...

Jerry Thompson, Jeffrey Leong, and Josette King pose with their 'Collected Clifton's! More fans are posing with their brand new copies of The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010, and you can find them on Lucille Clifton's Facebook fan page! Jerry Thompson, Event Coordinator for Book Inc. in Alameda and longtime friend of Ms. Clifton, is the host of the page, and is continuously posting pictures of booksellers, customers, and fans with the beautiful book. Share YOUR photo on the fan page, on our Facebook page, or on our Twitter page! Booksellers and Clifton fans nationwide are getting more and...

September 11 is a date which resonates with people all over the world, a date that holds so much weight and significance. While we honor and remember lost loved ones on this day, we also remember the lost voices that once breathed life and light into this world. As the official publication date of The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010, today, we honor and remember Lucille Clifton as one of the "major and most courageous voices." The new collection, available now in the BOA Bookstore, is a moving volume containing all of Ms. Clifton's published collections with more than...

Janice N. Harrington, author of Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone and The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home, shares her influences for The Hands of Strangers in a Ploughshares interview with Patricia Caspers. Caspers prefaces the interview with a description of the first spellbinding reading of the book she heard Harrington give: "I was struck by her ability to write about her subject - the lives of the elderly and those who tend to them - with frank graces." Caspers comments on Harrington's unique and masterful delivery and the way she asks for audience participation during...