BOA Blog

Rochester, NY—BOA Editions, Ltd. is pleased to announce that Margaret Ray of Lawrenceville, NJ is the winner of the 21st annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. Her winning manuscript, Good Grief, the Ground, was selected by celebrated poet and writer Stephanie Burt from a pool of more than X original submissions. Good Grief, the Ground will be published by BOA Editions in April 2023 as part of the New Poets of America Series with a foreword by Stephanie Burt. Ray will also receive a $1,000 honorarium.  "It's hard to stay present in this world: to stay not only alive but alert—to the Florida thunder,...

  Renia White is the author of the debut poetry collection Casual Conversation, which was selected by Aracelis Girmay as a Blessing the Boats Selection. The collection was published by BOA Editions on April 19, 2022. Casual Conversation imagines a new way of knowing, a way that encourages us to think through how we structure and stratify ourselves, inviting something strange and other to spill out. White challenges us to question whether there is anything casual about this life, even as she invites us to consider other logics and to think alongside each other. This book gives space to hold what we fear...

Rochester, NY - BOA is honored to announce that The Literary Arts Emergency Fund, supported by the Mellon Foundation, has generously awarded the press a $25,000 grant in support of the publication and promotion of new books of poetry. BOA is among 313 nonprofit literary arts organizations and publishers across the United States that will receive distributions from a pool of $4,300,000 in funding in response to continued financial losses due to the COVID-19 pandemic. BOA Executive Director and Publisher Peter Conners said, “We are grateful to the Literary Arts Emergency Fund for their generous grant to BOA Editions and...

As Women’s History Month comes to a close, check out some of the amazing recent BOA titles written by women! Below you’ll find a mix of poems and book descriptions to pique your interest and get you excited to read (or re-read) these dynamic and heart-felt collections. Letters to a Young Brown Girl by Barbara Jane Reyes Excerpt from "Dear Brown Girl," What if I told you that you don’t have to do as you’re told. Yes, you can cut up the script they made you recite by heart with your cut up tongue. Yes, by those people, who wanted...

 Rochester, NY— BOA Editions, Ltd. will publish A Tinderbox in Three Acts by Cynthia Dewi Oka as the next Blessing the Boats Selections title. Oka will receive a $5,000 honorarium, and her manuscript will be published in September 2022 as part of the American Poets Continuum Series. A Tinderbox in Three Acts is the second selection by Blessing the Boats Selections Editor-at-Large Aracelis Girmay. Girmay said of the collection: “I cannot say enough how critical this work is for its history, specificity, and devotion. At its center churn insurmountable, incomprehensible brutalities. These are the facts. But Oka and her fellow organizers, researchers, artists,...