BOA Blog

Poets & Writers recently featured Marsha de la O in its "Writers Recommend" section, an online exclusive on all things inspiring to writers in their creative process. Here's what de la O, author of the new Isabella Gardner Poetry Award-winning Antidote for Night, had to say: “Begin with bleakness. Bring yourself to the bare room. Voices will assail you, reminding you how many times you’ve been hit on the head, hard, reminding you of the bad genes, the narrow valley in Bohemia where your ancestors left their lives as factory hands, as milk maids, with their natural and legitimate children in...

The Santa Barbara Independent recently published a compelling interview with David Starkey and Antidote for Night author Marsha de la O, exploring the new collection's noir tendencies, de la O's hypnotizing reading style, and her process of going from elementary school teacher to full-time poetry writer. "Antidote for Night is so rich with imagery and characters and incident. It’s a beautiful book, but it’s also very dark," says Starkey. De la O contrasts topics on themes of darkness and her seer-like reading voice with light, congenial, and insightful humor--even imagining her book being read by Philip Marlowe in a Raymond...

These past few months have been a whirlwind of exciting awards news for BOA authors and titles! On Friday, October 23, poet Geffrey Davis (Revising the Storm, 2014) attended the 2015 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award ceremony in Washington, DC, where he was honored with the 2015 Hurston/Wright Finalist Award for poetry. Only one winner and one finalist were selected for each category. The 2015 poetry judges were Chris Abani, Alison Joseph, and Monica Hand. Here is what they have to say about Revising the Storm: "A finely wright meditative collection that calls to mind poets such as Carl Phillips and Jay Wright—yet,...

Library Journal has named Nickole Brown's Fanny Says a Best Book of 2015 for Poetry! According to LJ Editor Henrietta Verma: "We agonized, we discussed, we pondered, and most of all we read, read, read. The results are below: lists of what the LJ Reviews team can honestly say are the best titles published in 2015. They include a Top Ten list of the most outstanding titles of the year, both fiction and nonfiction; followed by 'More of the Best,'—the titles that we just couldn’t let go of although they didn’t make it to the top ten; and the best...

Poet and critic Ron Slate has written an in-depth review of Nickole Brown's 2015 collection Fanny Says. Focusing on Brown's language, form, and personal stake in her writing, Slate calls the collection "cross-genre with a purpose."  "Although the poems illuminate Fanny’s life and behavior, Fanny Says is an acknowledgement and appreciation of an inheritance, the poet’s striving 'to keep alive a fierce and singular part of myself that lives only through her,' as Brown remarked in an interview . . . Fanny Says is animated by the elemental principles of presence--the unique habits of an individual and the flaring of its influence through language."...