BOA Blog

Ray Gonzalez's new collection Beautiful Wall is one of four finalists for the 2016 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry! Beautiful Wall, released by BOA last fall, is an exploration of life in the Southwest and Gonzalez’s Mexican ancestry and American childhood. The collection delves into the realities of life in an all-at-once beautiful and difficult place.Gonzalez is a finalist among Star Tribune journalists, several previous award winners, and the state poet laureate, Joyce Sutphen. All category winners will be announced on April 16 at the Minnesota Book Awards gala in St. Paul.Click here to see the Star Tribune's complete list...

Nickole Brown's Fanny Says has recently been included on two important lists: Over the Rainbow's "2016 Over the Rainbow List: 68 LGBT Books for Adult Readers," and Advocate’s “The 30 Best Books You Missed in 2015."According to Over the Rainbow, Fanny Says is "a biography of a fiesty, bawdy, grandmother told through the poetry of her granddaughter. Funny, powerful, and steeped in truth and love." The 2016 Over the Rainbow Project book list is sponsored by the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Round Table (GLBTRT) of the American Library Association (ALA).Advocate featured Fanny Says alongside Pelvis with Distance, a new collection...

  In celebration of its 40th anniversary, BOA Editions is hosting a yearlong global social media campaign about the power of reading, using the hashtag #BOATurns40.BOA believes that a single book can transform the way we all read, think, live, and see the world. Asking readers to share their “ideal reading experience” on its anniversary landing page, BOA will select one winner each month from the current pool of participants to win a special edition anniversary gift, and will feature the winning stories on its social media pages. Throughout the year, the campaign will also highlight fresh video content of...

BOA translation Smugglers, by Aleš Debeljak, has been in the recent spotlight with reviews from such places as The Rumpus and World Literature Today.Damon Marbut's The Rumpus piece is less a review than a reading response, as he chronicles his reactions while moving through Deblejak's book. Marbut says, “Written in Slovenian and translated by poet/translator Bryan Henry, Smugglers is published by BOA Editions, a house which continuously presents a terrific range of poets to the national and world audience.“Ordinarily I do not read introductions or back matter before diving into a poetry book. Generally a skim-through of several poems is...

        NPR included two BOA books— Karen Volkman’s Whereso and Aracelis Girmay’s The Black Maria—in its highly-anticipated 2016 Poetry Preview!The list, entitled "In a Dark Time, the Eye Begins to See," features eight new books in total, focusing on the light that can be found in poetry during dark and trying times. The preview notes how each poet and new book will bring this light to readers in 2016.On Whereso: "Karen Volkman's poems are inscrutable at first. They demand effort, but when examined these poems reveal depths teeming with microscopic life. After her previous two books, Spar,...