BOA Blog

Evie Shockley is the author of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (U Iowa P, 2011) and six collections of poetry, most recently suddenly we (Wesleyan UP, 2023).   Among her earlier books, the new black (Wesleyan UP, 2011) received the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; semiautomatic (Wesleyan UP, 2017) received the same award in 2018, and was also a finalist that year for the LA Times Book Review Prize and the Pulitzer Prize.

BOA is proud to announce that Bone Symphony by Michelle Phuong Ho of New Haven, Connecticut has been selected as the Blessing the Boats Selection by 2024 Editor-at-Large Aracelis Girmay. Bone Symphony will be published in the fall of 2026. Bone Symphony mines the wreckage left by centuries of colonialism and imperialist warfare in Vietnam and reassembles the bones—testimonies from re-education camps, classifieds written by former boat people, toxic residue left by Agent Orange, a poem written from one side of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, memories inherited from elders, drawings by the author, and more.   Michelle Phuong Ho is a poet...

Nathan Dixon received his PhD in English literature and creative writing from the University of Georgia. His first book, Radical Red, won the BOA Editions Short Fiction Prize. His creative work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Fence, Tin House, Carolina Quarterly, Quarterly West, Redivider, and elsewhere. His critical/academic work has appeared in MELUS Journal, 3:AM, Transmotion, and Renaissance Papers.  In the following interview about his collection of short stories, Radical Red, winner of the 15th annual BOA Short Fiction Prize, Nathan discusses art and protest, provincialism and craftsmanship, and poetry and prose. BOA: In the Fall of 2023, George Packer argued...

Rochester, NY—BOA Editions, Ltd. is proud to announce that Leigh Lucas of San Francisco, CA is the winner of the 24th annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. Her winning manuscript, Splashed Things, was selected by celebrated poet and writer Maya C. Popa from a pool of nearly 800 original submissions. Splashed Things will be published by BOA Editions in April 2026 as part of the New Poets of America Series with a foreword by Maya C. Popa. Lucas will also receive a $1,000 honorarium. In selecting Splashed Things, final judge Maya C. Popa writes: "Profoundly affecting and finely crafted, this collection enacts...

Chaun Ballard is a doctoral student of poetry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, an affiliate editor for Alaska Quarterly Review, an assistant poetry editor for Prairie Schooner, and an assistant poetry editor for Terrain.org. He is the author of the chapbook Flight, which received the 2018 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize and is published by Tupelo Press. Ballard's poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Narrative Magazine, Oxford Poetry, Poetry Northwest, The Missouri Review, The New York Times, and other literary magazines. In the following self-interview about his first collection of poetry, Second Nature, winner of the 23rd annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, Chaun discusses personas, sonnets, and being in...