Rochester, NY — BOA Editions is proud to announce that Erika Meitner’s Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018) has been selected as one of four finalists in the poetry category of the Library of Virginia’s 22nd Annual Library of Virginia Literary Awards. The winner in each category will be selected from among these finalists and announced at a gala celebration at the Library of Virginia on Saturday, October 19, 2019.
“The commonwealth of Virginia is home to many talented writers whose work inspires and informs readers across the world,” said Librarian of Virginia Sandra G. Treadway. “The Library’s annual Literary Awards Celebration is such a joyous way to honor their amazing work and to introduce them to new audiences.”
Holy Moly Carry Me is Erika Meitner’s fifth collection of poems. This critically acclaimed collection plumbs human resilience and grit in the face of disaster, loss, and uncertainty. Meitner’s narrative poems take readers into the heart of southern Appalachia—its highways and strip malls, its fragility and danger—as the speaker wrestles with racial tensions, religious identity, gun violence, raising children, and the anxieties of life in the 21st century. With a refusal to settle for easy answers, Meitner’s poems embrace life in an increasingly fractured society, and they never stop asking what it means to love our neighbor as ourselves.
Erika Meitner’s previous works include Copia (BOA Editions, 2014) and Ideal Cities (Harper Perennial, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry Series winner. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Tin House, The New Republic, Virginia Quarterly Review, Oxford American, Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. In 2015, she was the US-UK Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast, and she has also received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Blue Mountain Center, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She is currently an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she directs the MFA and undergraduate programs in Creative Writing. For more information about Erika Meitner, visit erikameitner.com.
The Library of Virginia established its annual Literary Awards program in 1997 to honor Virginia writers and celebrate their contributions to the literary landscape of our state and nation. Given to Virginia authors in the categories of fiction and poetry—and to nonfiction authors for works about a Virginia subject as well—the awards are presented at an annual gala celebration that has become the Library’s signature event and an eagerly anticipated cultural tradition in Richmond. This year’s finalists were chosen by an independent panel of judges from more than 120 books nominated for the awards. A full list of finalists along with tickets and information about the gala celebration are available online at http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/litawards/.
BOA Editions, Ltd. is a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning not-for-profit publisher based in Rochester, New York. Founded in 1976 by the late poet, editor, and translator A. Poulin, Jr. to provide a venue for both new and established poets to be published, BOA has released more than 300 titles, including more than two dozen books of poetry-in-translation.
Congratulations, Erika!
