BOA Blog

The Ventura County Reporter has high praise for Marsha de la O and her newest collection Antidote for Night, just released this month by BOA Editions. A Ventura, CA, resident, de la O says her work often explores "a connection between geography and psyche." Southern California may be the main character in de la O's new book, but reviewer Nancy Lackey notes that while many artists have focused on the region, "few see through it with such a personal lens, or with such a yearning for the something better that must be on the other side. "Antidote for Night is visceral,...

James McManus' The Education of a Poker Player has been nominated by Kirkus Reviews editors for the 2015 Kirkus Prize for Fiction! While every book that receives a starred Kirkus review within the year is eligible for the prize, Kirkus editors and staff evaluate each of the eligible books to determine which are most worthy of nomination and prize consideration. The Kirkus Prize is one of the richest literary awards in the world, with a prize of $50,000 bestowed annually to authors of fiction, nonfiction and young readers’ literature. It was created to celebrate the 81 years of discerning, thoughtful...

We have more fantastic news to share: BOA collection Bridge by Robert Thomas is the 2015 PEN Center USA Literary Award winner for Fiction! Selected by a distinguished panel of writers, editors, critics, and journalists, Thomas will be honored with the other 2015 PEN Center USA Literary Awards winners at the at the 25th Annual Literary Awards Festival on November 16, 2015, at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, CA. The Literary Awards Festival is PEN Center USA's major fundraising event of the year, as well as the West's major literary event of the year, and is attended by...

We are thrilled to announce that another BOA author is the winner of the prestigious James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets! Kathryn Nuernberger’s forthcoming poetry collection, The End of Pink, has been chosen for the 2015 award, which is the only second-book award for poetry in the United States. Her collection will be released by BOA in fall 2016 within its American Poets Continuum Series. Established in 1954, the James Laughlin Award is given annually to recognize and support a superior second book of poetry by an American poet. Endowed in 1995 by the Drue Heinz Trust,...

Library Journal's Barbara Hoffert recently gave Marsha de la O's Antidote for Night a stellar review, calling the new book a "vividly captured Southern California." "Just don’t expect sun, sand, and celebrity glam," says the review; "the poet’s hard-knocks world instead encompasses drive-by killings, hard labor ('thirty-eight years working the same loom'), and orange trees blackened by coking factories." Hoffert continues, "Splendidly incisive, de la O doesn’t so much observe landscapes as create them, just as her father 'conjured this city,/ my labyrinth, our treasure' while navigating the 'red snake/ traffic.' More significant is how she creates emotional landscape, suffusing her lines...