BOA Blog

[caption id="attachment_567" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Lucille signing her BOA books. Photo by Robb Cohen."][/caption] This weekend, Lucille Clifton's poetic legacy will be honored nationally on television and radio: Bill Moyers Journal will air a tribute to Lucille tomorrow night. The show airs on PBS and starts at 9PM EST. A complete schedule list is available at the show's website: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/index-flash.html On radio, NPR's "Weekend Edition" will air a 4-5 minute tribute to Lucille including clips of her reading from her BOA books. A complete schedule list is available at the show's website: http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=7 Both of these tributes will undoubtedly be moving...

[caption id="attachment_515" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Lucille Clifton accepting the 2000 National Book Award (AP Photo)"][/caption] Matt Schudel wrote a moving tribute to Lucille that appeared in The Washington Post. The piece starts with a striking image from Lucille's girlhood: "When she was a girl, Lucille Clifton sat on her mother's lap and listened to her recite poetry. Her mother never made it through elementary school, but she knew the power of language, and her poems stayed in her daughter's head forever. But another memory seared itself in young Lucille's memory, too: when her father said no wife of his would be...

[caption id="attachment_558" align="alignleft" width="199" caption="The Rooster's Wife, poems (and cover art) by Russell Edson"][/caption] In 2005, we were thrilled to publish The Rooster's Wife by prose poet master Russell Edson. Russell was at the forefront of the emergence of prose poetry in America in the early 60s and he continues to produce his trademark hilarious, surreal, and poignant poems. What many people don't know is that Russell's father was a cartoonist and that cartooning had a strong influence on his style. Russell is also a visual artist himself - in fact, his artwork graces the cover of The Rooster's Wife....

[caption id="attachment_550" align="alignleft" width="217" caption="Syracuse U. MFA intern Anthony Antoniadis also loves the new copier"][/caption] Okay, so maybe it's only big news to us here in the office, but... we got a new copier yesterday! If you've ever seen that movie Office Space where they take their crappy office copier out into a field and beat it with bats - that's how we felt about our old copier. So this is huge for us. It's shiny, brand new, and does things we didn't know a copier could even do (faxing, stapling - whodathunkit?) As with all things non-profit, getting new...

"Poets across America called and e-mailed one another this past weekend, to take in the terrible news that Lucille Clifton died Saturday morning, at the age of seventy-three. Though Clifton surely possessed a cat’s nine lives—she had a transplanted kidney and had fought many bouts with cancer, in various parts of her body—we were still shocked that she had left us, for I do not think there is an American poet as beloved as Clifton, or one whose influence radiated as widely. " This beautiful piece appears "The Book Bench" section of The New Yorker. Read the entire article here:...