BOA Blog

Tessie Hutchinson’s Apron: A Thank You Note to Shirley Jackson & to BOA I don’t remember the first time I read Shirley Jackson’s iconic story “The Lottery,” but I do know that every time I reread that story I can’t help but think: Please God, don’t let me die right after doing the dishes.Her fingers still wet from the sink, Tessie Hutchinson scrambles to reach the village square in time for the lottery. Once there, she wipes her hands on her apron. She’s still in that apron when stones, hurled by her neighbors, rain down upon her.When “The Lottery” was...

Kirkus Reviews has awarded the Kirkus Star to Zach Powers, for his new short fiction collection, Gravity Changes. In a glowing review, the BOA Short Fiction Prize-winning collection is called a "fanciful take on life, love, tragedy, and human connection that draws its strength from insight instead of artifice."According to Kirkus, "On average, Kirkus’s editors award the Kirkus Star to 10 percent of all the books they assign for review. Their decisions are based on their long-running, deep knowledge of contemporary trends in publishing and their appreciation for exceptional writing and illustration." Books that receive the Kirkus Star are automatically considered for the prestigious...

I’ll never, at least not this side of dementia, forget the moment when I got the voicemail from BOA Editions publisher Peter Conners saying he wanted to talk with me. I was lying in a hammock in my in-laws’ backyard. Perhaps I’d retreated there to avoid arguing politics with my father-in-law, or maybe I was avoiding a different kind of argument with my not-yet-wife—who knows? It was a standard rope hammock, nothing fancy, but I was very happy to be in it, even before I got the voicemail. Hammocks are one of the few unimpeachably good inventions human beings have...

The Academy of American Poets recently put together a selection of poem favorites to kick off the start of Women’s History Month. Lucille Clifton's "sisters," from The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010, made the list of 11 poems. We love the list so much, we want to share the picks with you. Visit Poets.org to read more about them.“sisters” by Lucille Clifton “You Foolish Men” by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz“The Soul selects her own Society (303)” by Emily Dickinson“[we fight back to control the outside]” by kari edwards“Self-Portrait as Artemis” by Tarfia Faizullah“Moon for Our Daughters” by Annie Finch“Helen” by H. D.“Love Poem” by Audre Lorde“Landscape...

Ploughshares just published a stunning new review of Aracelis Girmay's the black maria for its series on "books of poetry that imagine humans’ impact on a geologic scale."According to reviewer Rachel Edelman, the black maria is an "intricate epic of black survival" that "enraptures the reader in a gaze that looks simultaneously backward and forward, toward past and future that are impossible to see yet crucial to imagine."The poems in 'elelegy' construct a collectively-focused history of the black body’s movement across the planet, while those in 'the black maria' account daily tragedies and joys of black American survival. Through radical...