BOA Blog

We are proud to announce that Christian Barter has been awarded the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award for his new collection, Bye-Bye Land! His book will be published by BOA Editions in spring 2017, within the American Poets Continuum Series. This award is given biennially to a poet with a new book of exceptional merit. Manuscripts are solicited; there is no formal submission process for this award.Poet, actress, and Associate Editor of Poetry magazine, Isabella Gardner (1915-1981) published five celebrated collections of poetry, and was the first recipient of the New York State Walt Whitman Citation of Merit for Poetry. She...

The latest issue of Pleiades includes fantastic new reviews of Nguyen Phan Que Mai’s The Secret of Hoa Sen and Sean Thomas Dougherty’s All You Ask for Is Longing.On The Secret of Hoa Sen: “The translating team of [Bruce] Weigl and Nguyen has pro­duced a volume that embodies the tension between the United States and Vietnam, while maintaining sympathy for both sides of the conflict. . . . Happily, The Secret of Hoa Sen includes English and Viet­namese versions of the poems and the presence of both reinforces the collection’s recurring theme— that of two cultures pressed against each other....

We are proud to announce that Aracelis Girmay has won the 2015 Annual Prairie Schooner Strousse Award for a group of poems from her new book, the black maria! The $500 Strousse Award is given in honor of Flora Strousse. Girmay's new collection continues to shine in the media spotlight, recently receiving numerous reviews and features from such places as O, The Oprah Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Late Night Library, and Iron Horse Review.Named an "Editor's Pick" for O Magazine’s list of "19 Books to Read in April," the black maria was also included on the "Rigoberto González list of...

Derrick Austin's new A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize-winning book Trouble the Water recently received a glowing review from Devil’s Lake. Calling the collection “rich and rewarding,” reviewer Jacques J. Rancourt says: "The debut poetry book has, since perhaps W.D. Snodgrass’s Heart’s Needle, become of its own a sub-genre: the art of declaring oneself, of revealing one’s influences as much as subverting those influences into a new and vibrant hybrid. In a year of truly stunning debuts, especially from other queer men (such as Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Rickey Laurentiis’ Boy with Thorn, Richie Hofmann’s Second Empire, and...

Beautiful Wall (BOA Editions, 2015) by Ray Gonzalez is the 2016 Minnesota Book Award winner for Poetry. Announced at the Minnesota Book Awards gala on April 16, 2016, this marks Gonzalez’s third time winning the prestigious award.A total of 252 books were nominated for Minnesota Book Awards this year, and 32 books were chosen as finalists by a panel of judges across the state.Beautiful Wall takes readers on a profound journey through the desert Southwest where the ever-changing natural landscape and an aggressive border culture rewrite intolerance and ethnocentric thought into human history. Inextricably linked to his Mexican ancestry and...