BOA Blog

We are pleased to announce that Zach Powers is the winner of the fifth annual BOA Editions Short Fiction Prize for his collection, Gravity Changes. The collection was selected from nearly 200 submissions by BOA Publisher Peter Conners. Powers will receive a $1,000 honorarium and book publication by BOA Editions, Ltd. within the American Reader Series in spring 2017. Of the collection, Peter Conners says: “Zach Powers wields a unique talent for creating strange and surreal worlds that, somehow, illuminate true human emotion more realistically than the realest realist. His characters defy gravity, sprout siblings from their shoulders, shrink universes...

BOA is thrilled to announce that its event, the BOA Editions 40th Anniversary Celebration, has been accepted for AWP 2016 in Los Angeles! Of the 1,781 event proposals submitted this year, the most in the conference's history, and 493 more than they have ever received before, AWP accepted 523 events involving more than 2,000 panelists for 2016. At this event, join five BOA authors whose poetry spans the 40 year history of one of America's true independent literary treasures. Li-Young Lee, Aracelis Girmay, Jillian Weise, Nikola Madzirov, and Michael Waters will read from their BOA titles and share a few...

To celebrate WXXI Rochester Public Radio's "Summer Book Week," BOA Editions was invited to the "Connections" show with guest host Scott Fybush and two other Rochester-based independent publishers, Open Letter Books and RIT Press, to discuss the current and future states of book publishing. In a fascinating hour-long discussion on the literary scene in Rochester, as well as the importance of mission-driven independent publishing, BOA Publisher Peter Conners had some fun things to say about Rochester as a city of readers: "Rochester is really a sexy city in a lot of ways because people who read are sexy," he says....

Kirkus Reviews has only rave things to say about James McManus' new collection of linked stories, The Education of a Poker Player. In a new *starred* review, Kirkus offers a thorough account of the new book and its merits: "McManus’ writing is deceptively artless: mundane details related in Vince’s slowly maturing voice track the unexceptional life of a middle-class Irish-American Catholic family in a Chicago suburb, with the obligatory JFK portrait on the wall and the obliging production of numerous offspring. Yet the author gradually forms these common facets of simple people into a sharp, intimate portrait of an intelligent,...

Robin McLean is taking the country by storm with her "Sidewind Across America" tour for her new BOA book Reptile House. The national reading community has welcomed her with open arms, which is demonstrated by her most recent interviews with New Hampshire Public Radio and Late Night Library. For The Bookshelf, NHPR's series on authors and books with ties to the Granite State, All Things Considered host Peter Biello interviewed McLean on elements of her new book, her personal inspirations, and her life before becoming an award-winning author, comparing her distinctive voice to that of Flannery O'Connor. First a lawyer and then a...