BOA Blog

Blessing the Boats Selections will honor new poetry books by women of color Rochester, New York –– BOA Editions, Ltd. has named Whiting Award-winning poet Aracelis Girmay as the Editor-at-Large for a new publishing line to spotlight new poetry books by women of color. Girmay will select and curate the Blessing the Boats Selections within BOA’s American Poets Continuum Series.  Named in honor of poet Lucille Clifton (1936–2010) and her National Book Award-winning collection Blessing the Boats: New & Selected Poems 1988–2000 (BOA, 2020), the Blessing the Boats Selections will celebrate works that continue Clifton’s legacy of writing to the...

Rochester, N.Y. — BOA Editions is delighted to announce that The Tiny Journalist by Naomi Shihab Nye has been selected as the Poetry Winner for the 2019 Writers’ League of Texas Book Awards. The Writers' League of Texas announced the winners of the 2019 WLT Book Awards this morning in their newsletter. The Tiny Journalist is Naomi Shihab Nye’s fifth poetry collection from BOA Editions. It was named a Best Poetry Book of 2019 by The Washington Post and previously won the 2020 Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Best Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. The collection...

On Saturday, September 12th, attendees of BOA’s 23nd annual Dine & Rhyme fundraiser gathered together for BOA’s first virtual Dine & Rhyme, held on Zoom. The event celebrated the publication of How to Carry Water by outstanding, award-winning BOA poet Lucille Clifton, edited by acclaimed poet Aracelis Girmay, author of the black maria (BOA Editions, 2016), Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011) and Teeth (Curbstone Press, 2007).  Aracelis gave a heart-felt reading of selected Lucille Clifton poems, and was interviewed by Michael Silverblatt, host of the nationally-syndicated show Bookworm. Aracelis also appeared on Bookworm on September 17th and you can listen...

Rochester, New York –– BOA Editions, Ltd. is pleased to announce that Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes is the winner of the tenth annual BOA Short Fiction Prize for her collection Are We Ever Our Own. Fuentes will receive a $1,000 honorarium and book publication by BOA Editions, Ltd. within the American Reader Series in spring 2022. BOA Publisher Peter Conners selected the winning manuscript. Conners said of the winning manuscript, "Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes weaves richly detailed stories brimming with magic, hauntings, and the multi-generational mythologies we build around our lives. Are We Ever Our Own transports readers to a world that is unsettling, familiar, and utterly...

Rochester, N.Y. — BOA Editions is excited to announce that Night Angler by Geffrey Davis is a nominee for the 2020 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry. The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award honors the best in Black literature in the United States and around the globe. Night Angler, Geffrey Davis’s James Laughlin Award-winning second collection of poems, reads as an evolving love letter and meditation on what it means to raise an American family. In poems that express a deep sense of gratitude and wonder, Davis delivers a heart-strong prayer that longs for home, for safety for Black lives, and for the...