BOA Blog

Nguyen Phan Que Mai's The Secret of Hoa Sen (2014), translated from the Vietnamese by the author and by poet Bruce Weigl, was recently featured on Melodically Challenged, a weekly radio broadcast on Georgia State University’s radio station.Commemorating Vietnam’s 15th Poetry Day, which falls on the 15th day of the first month of the Vietnamese Lunar New Year (February 11 on the Gregorian calendar), the show featured Que Mai as she read her poems in Vietnamese, followed by English translations read by K. B. Kincer."Vietnamese folksongs, songs, and music performed by Ngo Hong Quang, including 'Biển,' a composition from Mai’s poetry, were...

In a glowing new review from Up the Staircase Quarterly, reviewer Travis Chi Wing Lau discusses the "active, restless, ferocious love" found in Chen Chen's A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize-winning When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities.Admitting that he came to the collection looking for "answers," Chi Wing Lau says, "I, like many other queer people of color, are left full of questions, fearful and tearful questions. And in our singular and collective askings, we struggle to grapple with traumas, old and new. But Chen forgoes the pleasure of any easy answers."Instead, readers find that "identity is not neatly sorted...

In a new piece from the Harvard Review, poet and reviewer William Doreski assembles a list of eleven new poets that "all deserve serious consideration and a readership beyond a few friends." Included on this list is Derrick Austin's recent A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize-winning collection, Trouble the Water."The intelligence and accomplishment of each year’s crop of debut poetry collections always astonishes me. Poetry is one of our most widely practiced arts, but it receives too little attention in the press. Still, poets continue to offer their wares."Austin is in good company, being reviewed alongside such other poets as Eleanor Chai, Leora Fridman, Lynn Pedersen, Kimberly...

A new review of Peter Makuck's Mandatory Evacuation, published in the latest issue of North Carolina Literary Review, considers the difference between writers who "love to make up almost everything" and those who "prefer to work with the landscapes and milieu made familiar by upbringing, home, and travel."Recognizing that Makuck "tends toward the latter," reviewer Marly Youmans aims to "discover how rooted a narrator can be in his own times and places." She says, "The persona emerging from the poems of Mandatory Evacuation observes and is allied to the 'hunched figure with his hook, / shaped like a question, pole tossed' into the shiny blackness of the...

As with all non-profit organizations, BOA depends upon grant funding and private donations to underwrite our work. The truth is that the cultural life of America—symphonies, dance companies, art galleries, arts-in-education programs, you name it—depends upon public funding for its very survival.If the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) are cut, it would decimate the cultural life of America and spell the end for many non-profit organizations. It would also end the substantial revenue stream that cultural institutions bring to our cities and towns.On behalf of non-profit arts organizations across the country,...