BOA Blog

Derrick Austin, Jenna Fisher, and Melissa Hall at AWP. Photo courtesy of Publishers Weekly.BOA was thrilled to celebrate its 40th anniversary at AWP 2016 in Los Angeles! The whole conference was a whirlwind of excitement and literature, and was a fabulous way to mark our milestone year.Attended by hundreds of people, the BOA Editions 40th Anniversary Celebration premiered a documentary-style short film created by Steve Fisher of Fisher Media; a fabulous reading by BOA poets Michael Waters, Aracelis Girmay, Nikola Madzirov, Jillian Weise, and Li-Young Lee; and — to top it all off — a surprise onstage marriage proposal by BOA reader...

Aracelis Girmay's new book the black maria received high praise from such places as Library Journal, Booklist, and The Chicago Review of Books in the weeks leading up to its April release.The Library Journal starred review calls the new book "beautiful, brilliant, and palpably angry; an important book all readers can appreciate."Booklist praises Girmay’s ability to write about anything from jellyfish to Venetian iconology: "Lunar maria, dark, basaltic plains on the moon’s surface, take their name from the Latin word for seas, identified as such by mistaken astronomers. This fascinating confusion fuels Girmay’s third poetry collection, which co-opts the sailing-obsessed...

Derrick Austin's debut collection Trouble the Water is receiving high praise from all over, most recently from The Rumpus and Pank Magazine. Both places highlight Austin’s fearless dive into issues of race, sexuality, and religion.The Rumpus focuses on Austin’s voice, and how he isn’t writing an angry war song, but rather a meditation on what the world could be like if we allowed ourselves to live with our hearts open: "At the end, Austin’s speaker does not instruct us to 'Make a fist,' to strike back at the world for its wrongs. Neither does he instruct us to fold our...

Legendary actor and comedian Bill Murray kicked off National Poetry Month by reading and discussing Lucille Clifton's poetry on Jimmy Kimmel Live!Regarding the recent feature in O, The Oprah Magazine, in which Bill Murray excerpts some of his favorite poems, Jimmy Kimmel says: "I have to say, poetry is not something that I ever read, but when I read these excerpts that you came up with, they all seemed great to me. This one in particular is great: 'What the Mirror Said.'"Nodding in agreement, Murray says of Lucille Clifton: "Her stuff's unbelievable. It's just incredible and I didn't know it...

Poet Chen Chen. Photo by Jeff Gilbert.Chen Chen, the 15th annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize winner, recently spoke to PBS Newshour about his identity and what it means to be Chinese, American, and gay. Chen focuses much of his poetry on how we form our identities.Chen says, “I felt like I couldn’t be Chinese and American and gay all at the same time. I felt like the world I was in was telling me that these had to be very separate things. Poems were a way for those different experiences to come together, for them to be in the...