BOA Blog

This past weekend, BOA poet Nin Andrews was featured on-air for Prosody, a public radio show for NPR affiliate WESA 90.5 FM. In a fantastic interview, Andrews read from her forthcoming collection Why God Is a Woman. Set on a magical island where women rule and men are the second sex, Why God Is a Woman is the story of a boy who, exiled from the island because he could not abide by its sexist laws, looks back with both nostalgia and bitterness and wonders: Why does God have to be a woman? Celebrated prose poet Nin Andrews creates a...

In a fascinating Q&A with Please Excuse This Poem, BOA poet Erika Meitner discusses her "favorites," including the first and favorite books she's ever read. Included among the first poems she has ever read and loved are Lucille Clifton's “Admonitions” and “Roots," both from a copy of Contemporary American Poetry, edited by the late BOA founder A. Poulin, Jr., which she bought  at a library sale when she was 15 years old. Erika Meitner is most recently the author of Copia. This fourth book by Meitner grapples with the widespread implications of commercialism and over-consumption, particularly in exurban America. Documentary...

According to a new fiction review from Publishers Weekly, Robin McLean's May collection of short stories, Reptile House, "moves seamlessly from adultery to kidnapping, from assassination plots to extreme geothermal events, all in a voice that is spare and darkly poetic." The fascinating characters in these nine short stories abandon families, plot assassinations, nurse vendettas, tease, taunt, and terrorize. They retaliate for bad marriages, derail their lives with desires and delusions, and wait decades for lovers. How far will we go to escape to a better dream? What consequences must we face for hope and fantasy? Probing the dark underbelly of...

Erika Meitner's poem "Outside the Abandoned Packard Plant," from her recent BOA book Copia, was featured in Sunday's New York Times Magazine. The poem was selected by former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey as the newly relaunched magazine's poem of the week. According to the feature, "There is a driving rhythm in this poem — the industry of crickets, the forward motion of the lines — even as there is no man-made machinery at work in the defunct auto plant. The contrast between the two heightens the tension between what is lost and the image, in the last line, of...

We are pleased to announce that BOA poet Aracelis Girmay (Kingdom Animalia) has just won a 2015 Whiting Award for poetry! 2015 marks the 30th anniversary of these prestigious $50,000 awards given each year to ten exceptional emerging writers of fiction, nonfiction, drama and poetry. In the case of Aracelis Girmay, the published work the judges read was Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011). Santa Ana-born Girmay (who now splits her time between Amherst, Massachusetts, and New York) is one of the ten 2015 recipients, all of whom were honored on March 5, 2015 at a ceremony at the New York Historical Society in...