BOA Blog

We have more fantastic news to share: BOA collection Bridge by Robert Thomas is the 2015 PEN Center USA Literary Award winner for Fiction! Selected by a distinguished panel of writers, editors, critics, and journalists, Thomas will be honored with the other 2015 PEN Center USA Literary Awards winners at the at the 25th Annual Literary Awards Festival on November 16, 2015, at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, CA. The Literary Awards Festival is PEN Center USA's major fundraising event of the year, as well as the West's major literary event of the year, and is attended by...

We are thrilled to announce that another BOA author is the winner of the prestigious James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets! Kathryn Nuernberger’s forthcoming poetry collection, The End of Pink, has been chosen for the 2015 award, which is the only second-book award for poetry in the United States. Her collection will be released by BOA in fall 2016 within its American Poets Continuum Series. Established in 1954, the James Laughlin Award is given annually to recognize and support a superior second book of poetry by an American poet. Endowed in 1995 by the Drue Heinz Trust,...

Library Journal's Barbara Hoffert recently gave Marsha de la O's Antidote for Night a stellar review, calling the new book a "vividly captured Southern California." "Just don’t expect sun, sand, and celebrity glam," says the review; "the poet’s hard-knocks world instead encompasses drive-by killings, hard labor ('thirty-eight years working the same loom'), and orange trees blackened by coking factories." Hoffert continues, "Splendidly incisive, de la O doesn’t so much observe landscapes as create them, just as her father 'conjured this city,/ my labyrinth, our treasure' while navigating the 'red snake/ traffic.' More significant is how she creates emotional landscape, suffusing her lines...

Jackpot UK recently reviewed The Education of a Poker Player by New York Times-bestselling author James McManus, calling it a "thoroughly refreshing read" and a "coming of age snapshot" for protagonist Vincent Killeen. Reviewer Sam Marsden notes how the book nods to the original poker classic by Herbert O. Yardley, which was - in its time - "a groundbreaking instruction manual for the burgeoning poker world on how they could win at the game . . . it is clearly a significant text in James McManus’ Education because these stories, molded into a novella, revolve around the pivotal moment when the...

MOCA Cleveland photo by Deidre McPherson BOA poet Sean Thomas Dougherty recently participated in a group performance, titled Rhythm and Resistance, in celebration of the power of the written and spoken word at the prestigious MOCA Cleveland (Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland). The reading was presented as part of the Mimeo Revolution: Artist Book + Zine Fair in connection with the summer exhibition How to Remain Human (on view through September 5). This 3-day event was inspired by poet and publisher d.a. levy and renowned comix creator and graphic novelist Derf Backderf, key figures in the exhibition. The spirit of levy's work (rebellious, ardent, and resolutely...