BOA Blog

Every working writer will recognize what I’m about to describe: the simultaneous anticipation, excitement, and dread when an unknown area code appears on one’s cell phone screen. Telemarketers looking for money they don’t need? Planned Parenthood looking for money they do need? Wrong number looking for someone named Lester? During that fateful four seconds before the phone switches over to voicemail, the mind reels like the Rolodexes of yesteryear: do I have any long, lost relatives now living in Rochester, New York? Did I enter any book contests out of Rochester, New York? In my case, the answers to these...

A film by BOA poet Kai Carlson-Wee, Riding the Highline, has won a 2017 Shoestring Trophy Award, and will screen at the George Eastman Museum’s Dryden Theatre as part of the Rochester International Film Festival. The film screening will take place on Friday, April 21, at 8:00 p.m., followed by an audience Q&A with the filmmaker. The event is free and open to the public. Kai Carlson-Wee is the author of the forthcoming BOA poetry collection Rail (spring 2018).Riding the Highline is a short documentary film about poet brothers Kai and Anders Carlson-Wee hopping freight trains across the country. The...

      If you open a BOA book, there’s a good chance you’ll find a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) “Art Works” logo on the copyright page. When you do, it means that the book you’re holding was published with the support of an NEA grant.For nearly twenty years, the NEA has supported a portion of the books we publish. These grants provide partial funds for the production, publication, and promotion of new BOA titles. In 2017, a grant of $20,000 from the NEA will allow BOA to undertake the publication of eight new titles (a project that’s...

A new review from Publishers Weekly is calling Zach Powers's BOA Short Fiction Prize-winning Gravity Changes a collection of "fantastical" stories that "bend the laws of physics and fiction to leave lasting impressions."According to the review, these "engaging" stories "manage to integrate hints of the fantastic, departing from the collection’s established mode without abandoning it entirely. The collection’s longest piece, 'Sleeping Bears,' is also its strongest, turning a clever metaphor for transparency in the age of social media into a funny, affecting examination of modern workplace dynamics."The review concludes, "Powers excels in his earnest care for his characters and a willingness to test out every idea,...

A rave new review of Karen Volkman's Whereso is featured in the latest issue of Rain Taxi. According to reviewer Cindra Halm, "Whereso observes, chronicles, and ultimately demonstrates the body in motion through topics of dance and film performances, travel and home, dreams and memories, and passageways, dramatizing issues of location and dislocation, living up to the title’s dangling, archaic gesture of indeterminacy."Following the transcendent, abstractionist poems of Nomina, this collection returns to tangible experiences of the body—its range of expressivity and physical movement in space. Where is the body in travel? What space does it occupy in dreams and memory? With rich perplexity, Whereso responds to dance,...