BOA Blog

We are thrilled to announce that Derrick Austin’s Trouble the Water has been selected as one of five finalists for the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award by Claremont Graduate University. The award, which includes a $10,000 prize, honors the "first poetry volume published the previous year by a poet of particular promise."According to Lori Anne Ferrell, director of the Tufts awards, "Poetry has the power to remind us of what is truly significant, worthy, and lasting in our culture. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Awards at CGU, and once again we honor the careers of talented...

We are thrilled to announce that Juan Felipe Herrera, the current United States Poet Laureate, has selected BOA poet Ray Gonzalez for the 2017 Witter Bynner Fellowship!Herrera will introduce a program celebrating Gonzalez on March 21, 2017, at the James Madison Building in Washington, DC. The event is free and open to the public.Gonzalez will receive a $10,000 fellowship. Now in its 20th year, the fellowship is made possible by the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry.About his selection, Herrera said, “Ray Gonzalez, a longtime poet, diamond-eyed traveler, observer of our Southwestern landscapes and peoples, is a most worthy writer to...

In a new Rain Taxi review of Stephen Dobyns's poetry collection The Day's Last Light Reddens the Leaves of the Copper Beech, reviewer Jennifer van Alstyne calls the book "a poignant collection about love, life, and the slow wisdom that 'all stories are sad when they reach their end.'"Noting the collection's focus on the hard, ephemeral truth of mortality, the review says: "Even though Dobyns presents time as both stagnant and looming, it is also relentlessly linear. There is a sense that at every moment we are each approaching our own deaths, and with each death, each memory 'seems so real...

Aracelis Girmay's the black maria is on yet another "best of the year" list, this time for Chicago Review of Books's "The Best Poetry Books of 2016."Reviewer Adam Morgan offers the collection the highest possible praise: "the black maria isn’t just some of the best poetry I read this year, it’s also one of the most powerful and memorable collections I’ve read as an adult."According to a recent review of the book by Sanya Noel, "the black maria [is] a haunting, blistering, vital examination of the African diaspora from 15th-century slave ships to Neil deGrasse Tyson . . . More than any other question, the black maria forces...

Indian poet Mangalesh Dabral's recent translated collection, This Number Does Not Exist, was just reviewed in Biblio, one of the top literary journals in India.Reviewer Rajesh Sharma calls the collection a "fine arrangement," with the original Hindi language facing the English translation on every page. "While it makes the book a handy resource for translation workshops, it also makes the translators vulnerable by exposing their tender spots. The invitation to compare becomes irresistible."Rendering translation an art in itself, the review says: "As a matter of fact, translation can, paradoxically, enrich, supplement and complete what is already rich, finished and completed. Walter Benjamin...