BOA Blog

Greetings, dear readers! BOA Editions is proud to celebrate the vibrant and vital works of America's black poets. From W. E. B. Du Bois to Langston Hughes to our own beloved Lucille Clifton, America's black poets have enriched the American literary community with their words and voices for generations. Last week, the Academy of American Poets published a list of 12 poems to read for black history month selected by twelve contemporary black poets, including Safiya Sinclair's recommendation to read " “won’t you celebrate with me” by Lucille Clifton—one of our favorite poems from The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010.  won't you...

Tara Wanda Merrigan wrote an in-depth portrait of Poulin Prize-winning poet Marcelo Hernandez Castillo in an article published at the Paris Review this week. The article, "A DACA Poet Speaks Out," describes Castillo's experience living as an undocumented immigrant brought to the United States when he was five years old: "Castillo was excluded from the mundane privileges that documented Americans take for granted. When the local public library began requiring Social Security numbers, Castillo could no longer borrow books. When driving, Castillo strictly adhered to speeding laws. He would drive his brown Ford Taurus sedan, chosen for its discreteness, at exactly sixty-seven miles...

Rochester, NY—National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Jane Chu has approved more than $25 million in grants as part of the NEA’s first major funding announcement for fiscal year 2018.  Included in this announcement is an Art Works grant of $10,000 to BOA Editions, Ltd. to support the publication and promotion of poetry and short fiction collections. The Art Works category is the NEA’s largest funding category and supports projects that focus on the creation of art that meets the highest standards of excellence, public engagement with diverse and excellent art, lifelong learning in the arts, and/or the strengthening of...

Craig Morgan Teicher's The Trembling Answers, Chen Chen's When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, Christian Barter's Bye-Bye Land, and Christine Kitano's Sky Country all made The Brooklyn Rail's list of the Best Books of 2017. Brooklyn Rail Books Editor Joseph Salvatore (author of To Assume a Pleasing Shape, BOA Editions, 2011) introduced his top 25 list of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction books by describing how the stories we tell ourselves sustain and define us during times of turmoil and change, noting that: "Of all the story forms the most political is literature. For it travels in the stealthiest of...

We are thrilled to announce that Chen Chen is the winner of the of the 2018 Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA) New Writers Award in Poetry for his Poulin Prize-winning collection When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017). The GLCA judges praised Chen's work, stating: “A mix of clever poetic premises and life’s abiding promise, Chen Chen’s When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities is a debut collection that cannot be ignored. This collection is by turns comic, dark, self-obsessed, playful, and restless. The poems move into...