BOA Blog

We are thrilled to announce that Janice N. Harrington’s Yard Show has been named to the prestigious 2024 National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) Awards Longlist in Poetry! This recognition highlights Harrington’s incredible poetic craft and the vital storytelling in her latest collection. Blending Black history, cultural expression, and the natural world, Yard Show investigates how Black Americans have cultivated a sense of belonging in the Midwestern United States. Through vivid descriptions of objects found in yard shows, Harrington's poetry transforms everyday items into symbols of creativity, resilience, and identity. Praise for Yard Show Publishers Weekly called the collection "a delightful...

    Join us in congratulating longtime BOA Editions author Naomi Shihab Nye on receiving the 2024 Wallace Stevens Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Academy of American Poets! Naomi’s poetic brilliance and unwavering commitment to hope and humanity have touched readers around the world. As the proud publisher of her collections Fuel, Red Suitcase, The Tiny Journalist, Transfer, and You & Yours, we invite you to rediscover these powerful collections available in paperback, digital, and audiobook formats.  Click here to view the Academy of American Poets Press Release Click here to view the Associated Press's article

Yard Show by Janice N. Harrington is a powerful collection of poems depicting the life and reality of being a Black American. It presents the reality of Black History with a personal touch. It’s powerful in the way that it cuts straight to the point and makes you think about all the things you’ve seen reported in the news, or stories that families have shared about their own experiences. I was genuinely surprised by how forward and honest this book was depicting the brutal reality of our world. There were quite a few poems in this book that I had...

You know the feeling of losing someone? The feeling of being discombobulated as you try to navigate through the harshness of life when you no longer have someone or something that was so deeply rooted to your very being. d-sorientation by Charleen McClure is an ardent accumulation of poems that tackles the strong relations one could have with oneself, a mother, a lover, and a place. It’s sensual in some ways and heart wrenching in the rest. It shows the toll that caretaking can have on one’s psyche while also drawing in the bittersweet nostalgia. The lines in these poems...