BOA Blog

An exclusive interview with "author of sad books" Craig Morgan Teicher is featured in this month's issue of The Brooklyn Rail,  with terrific insights into Teicher's perception of "sadness," the art of poetry, and his new collection To Keep Love Blurry. A personal and intimate writer, especially in his new book, Teicher gets personal in the interview about why and how he writes, and specifically why he calls himself the "author of sad books." "I think of humor as an expression of sadness," he says. "Performance is an expression of the need to be acknowledged, and I think of poetry...

Exhibits for Lucille Clifton's works are now open at Emory University, the same place that houses her literary and personal papers, her private library of  literary manuscripts (poems, short stories, essays, interviews, book reviews, translations of poems, speeches), correspondences, teaching files, files related to organizations with which she was associated, photographs, audiovisual material, and even the papers of Ms. Clifton's husband Fred Clifton.  According to Writing Without Paper, Ms. Clifton's "spirit writings" are of particular interest. These are her "written communications with the spirit world," including Ms. Clifton's "explanations and descriptions of her channelings and transcriptions of poems 'passed' to...

When it comes to having the right words, Kevin Young says that we need not look any further than Lucille Clifton. As co-editor of The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010, Young had the opportunity to explore the deeper layers of Ms. Clifton's poems. In a Baltimore Magazine exclusive interview, he says: "Seeing Lucille Clifton’s work all together, I was amazed at the sheer breadth of it—both in terms of how much work she made, but also the ways in which it all adds up to something greater. I knew this instinctively, but it’s another thing to read so much...

It was a good weekend for The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010! In the September 1 issues of both Library Journal and Booklist, the 'Collected Clifton' received two rave reviews - one of them *starred.* Ellen Kaufman's *starred* Library Journal review of the landmark collection suggests that Ms. Clifton invokes through her poetry "'lost people'" and "'lost poems' that have fallen off the map into the mouths of dragons," and that the late poet "imagined for those who couldn’t or wouldn’t—the racist, the incestuous father, the victim, the tired, the poor, the overlooked, the dead, and her own buried...

Lafayette College has proudly announced the big news that its own Lee Upton has won the 2nd Annual BOA Editions Short Fiction Prize! Upton's The Tao of Humiliation is a collection that impressed BOA Publisher and prize judge Peter Conners with its ability to expose the "complexity of human emotions buried in even our simplest interactions."  Conners says of the collection: "Upton tells a great story, yes, but she never bows to easy answers or pre-packaged characterizations...To write with such skill and sensitivity takes great life experience and the patience of a master writer." Upton has had the ability to...