BOA Blog

A Poets & Writers article on writers and educators working against gun violence in the classroom names Erika Meitner as one writer “making the gun issue central to her work, as well as to her activism.” Writer Sarah M. Seltzer notes how Meitner’s personal history has influenced her connection to gun violence. Meitner signed a contract for a teaching job at Virginia Tech a few days before the mass shooting on campus that killed thirty-two and wounded seventeen. “My first classes of undergraduate and graduate students had experienced the shooting,” Meitner says. “It was a community in trauma.” The article continues:...

Greetings! Every week throughout the summer, BOA's staff and interns will share one of our favorite poems from our over 300 collections of poetry. This week's poem in honor of Pride Month is from Cenzontle by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo. Gesture and Pursuit I want to be the bride days later when she is no longer a bride, combing her hair in the mirror. But it is too late. I've already locked myself in my room and imagined every variation between witness and music. I want everything to touch me before it is bright enough to slip through the house undetected— like the sound...

By popular demand, the BOA Poem of the Week has returned! Every week throughout the summer, BOA's staff and interns will share one of our favorite poems from our over 300 collections of poetry. This week's poem was selected by Intern Noah M. from Sean Thomas Dougherty's The Second O of Sorrow. Biography of LeBron as Ohio When is a poem one word? Even at 17 he was Barakaon the court, Coltrane gold toned, a kind of running riff,more than boy-child, man-child, he was one word like Prince.How back in those drunken days when I stillran in bars & played schoolyard ball&...

Readers in Rochester enjoyed a rare treat on Friday, April 20, when award-winning poet Chen Chen gave a free reading at City Hall in honor of National Poetry Month. The event was co-sponsored by the City of Rochester and BOA Editions, a local not-for-profit independent publisher of poetry and other literary works. Chen is a celebrated young poet whose debut collection When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities won the prestigious GLCA New Writer’s Award, the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Award, and was longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award for Poetry. His work draws...

We are thrilled to announce that Chen Chen is the winner of the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry for his debut collection When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017). Chen was announced as winner at a ceremony held at the New School in New York, NY, on Thursday, April 26, 2018. "I am honored and astounded to receive this award for a book that I wrote really because I needed it—poems that refuse to separate sexuality and race, that are political and restless and just, a whole lot of gaysian...