BOA Blog

Jerry Thompson, Jeffrey Leong, and Josette King pose with their 'Collected Clifton's! More fans are posing with their brand new copies of The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010, and you can find them on Lucille Clifton's Facebook fan page! Jerry Thompson, Event Coordinator for Book Inc. in Alameda and longtime friend of Ms. Clifton, is the host of the page, and is continuously posting pictures of booksellers, customers, and fans with the beautiful book. Share YOUR photo on the fan page, on our Facebook page, or on our Twitter page! Booksellers and Clifton fans nationwide are getting more and...

September 11 is a date which resonates with people all over the world, a date that holds so much weight and significance. While we honor and remember lost loved ones on this day, we also remember the lost voices that once breathed life and light into this world. As the official publication date of The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010, today, we honor and remember Lucille Clifton as one of the "major and most courageous voices." The new collection, available now in the BOA Bookstore, is a moving volume containing all of Ms. Clifton's published collections with more than...

Janice N. Harrington, author of Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone and The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home, shares her influences for The Hands of Strangers in a Ploughshares interview with Patricia Caspers. Caspers prefaces the interview with a description of the first spellbinding reading of the book she heard Harrington give: "I was struck by her ability to write about her subject - the lives of the elderly and those who tend to them - with frank graces." Caspers comments on Harrington's unique and masterful delivery and the way she asks for audience participation during...

An exclusive interview with "author of sad books" Craig Morgan Teicher is featured in this month's issue of The Brooklyn Rail,  with terrific insights into Teicher's perception of "sadness," the art of poetry, and his new collection To Keep Love Blurry. A personal and intimate writer, especially in his new book, Teicher gets personal in the interview about why and how he writes, and specifically why he calls himself the "author of sad books." "I think of humor as an expression of sadness," he says. "Performance is an expression of the need to be acknowledged, and I think of poetry...

Exhibits for Lucille Clifton's works are now open at Emory University, the same place that houses her literary and personal papers, her private library of  literary manuscripts (poems, short stories, essays, interviews, book reviews, translations of poems, speeches), correspondences, teaching files, files related to organizations with which she was associated, photographs, audiovisual material, and even the papers of Ms. Clifton's husband Fred Clifton.  According to Writing Without Paper, Ms. Clifton's "spirit writings" are of particular interest. These are her "written communications with the spirit world," including Ms. Clifton's "explanations and descriptions of her channelings and transcriptions of poems 'passed' to...