We are excited to announce two of Boa’s authors, James Ciano and Leigh Lucas, have been selected as finalists for the 2026 CALIBA Golden Poppy Award in Poetry! James Ciano was named finalist for his poetry collection The Committee of Men, and Leigh Lucas was selected for her poetry collection Splashed Things. To see the full list of finalists, click here.
The California Independent Booksellers Alliance (CALIBA) present the Golden Poppy Awards annually to recognize the most distinguished books written by California-based writers and artists. Each awards category has a committee made up of booksellers throughout the state who are tasked with choosing five finalists and one winner.
Ciano’s debut collection The Committee of Men explores the cycles of violence men inflict on one another and themselves, examining how silence, shame, and inherited expectations shape masculine identity.
Lucas’s dark humored and deeply moving Splashed Things examines the chaotic terrain of grief following the suicide of a former boyfriend. This collection was selected by Maya C. Popa as winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize for its emotional courage, inventive language, and haunting beauty.
Praise for The Committee of Men and Splashed Things
“James Ciano’s exquisite debut, The Committee of Men, offers striking meditations on masculinity reminiscent of B.H. Fairchild and Philip Levine. Brilliantly tender, after reading it, this collection will compel you to do as the speaker’s beloved asks: ‘Start again, from the beginning.'” -Nicole Sealey, author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure
“‘I sing so he can cry,’ writes Leigh Lucas in Splashed Things, her portrait of a young woman devastated by great and unexpected loss. Into these deftly built and deeply moving poems, Lucas alchemizes the memory of grief and the grief of memory, with restraint, irreverence, and a devotion so total that I can only understand it as love. I don’t know a single person who could read this book with an open heart and mind and not be made more human.” -Charif Shanahan, Whiting Award-winning author of Trace Evidence: Poems
