BOA Blog

This Tuesday, June 26 at 6 p.m., BOA Editions presents an evening of Poetry, Jazz, and Art at the Rochester Contemporary Art Center (RoCo). The event is free and open to the public, and will take place during the Rochester International Jazz Festival, one of the largest jazz festivals in the world! Featured will be BOA poet Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line (BOA 2010) and Broken Hallelujahs (BOA 2007). Dougherty's work utilizes a variety of experimental and traditional forms including canzone and elliptical poems, and explores questions of multiracial identity, the complexities of...

One week, 204 poets, over 50 languages, and 100,000 poems flurrying to the ground from above. No, this is not a scene from an ancient Greek epic... But that is the idea of this year's Poetry Parnassus, a massive poetry celebration established as part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad in London, which is being called the biggest gathering of poets in world history. From more than 6,000 recommended poets, 204 have been chosen to represent their nations at Southbank Centre in London from Tuesday, June 26th-- Sunday, July 1st, in an event to re-establish the poetic heritage of the ancient...

This Sunday, June 24th, BOA authors Michael Waters and Aracelis Girmay will read their poetry as part of Drew University's MFA Poetry Reading Series! The series (June 21-27) will feature performances from 14 award-winning poets from around the nation and is free and open to the public-- an opportunity you won't want to miss! Waters and Girmay will read at 7:30 in Mead Hall at Drew University (NJ), along with poet Alicia Ostriker. Waters, author of ten collections of poetry and professor at Monmouth University, is the co-editor of Contemporary American Poetry and has appeared in numerous literary journals. He...

photo courtesy of poesiefestival.org In perhaps one of the coolest interviews we at BOA have heard in a long time, host and notable poet Ilya Kaminsky discusses with Nikola Madzirov, award-winning Macedonian poet and author of BOA book Remnants of Another Age, "the poetics of war and its aftermath, and the nature of memory and rediscovering." The extensive audio recording of the interview is truly a once-in-a-lifetime glimpse into linguistic, cultural, and historical concepts currently ongoing in the studies of so many scholars, all from the fascinating lived experiences and memories of Madzirov. Madzirov has been called "one of the...

BOA author Christopher Kennedy will read in Rochester this Saturday as part of City Newspaper's Culture Crawl. The reading is billed as" The Rise and Fall of the Middle Class" and will dovetail with host venue Rochester Contemporary Art Center's current exhibit "Work It: Artists Address Labor and Unemployment." The reading starts promptly at 1PM at Rochester Contemporary Art Center, 137 East Ave., Rochester, NY 14604. The event is free and open to the public. Christopher Kennedy grew up in a working-class suburb of Syracuse, New York. He received a B.A. in English from LeMoyne College and a M.A. in...