BOA Blog

[caption id="attachment_515" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Lucille Clifton accepting the 2000 National Book Award (AP Photo)"][/caption] Matt Schudel wrote a moving tribute to Lucille that appeared in The Washington Post. The piece starts with a striking image from Lucille's girlhood: "When she was a girl, Lucille Clifton sat on her mother's lap and listened to her recite poetry. Her mother never made it through elementary school, but she knew the power of language, and her poems stayed in her daughter's head forever. But another memory seared itself in young Lucille's memory, too: when her father said no wife of his would be...

[caption id="attachment_550" align="alignleft" width="217" caption="Syracuse U. MFA intern Anthony Antoniadis also loves the new copier"][/caption] Okay, so maybe it's only big news to us here in the office, but... we got a new copier yesterday! If you've ever seen that movie Office Space where they take their crappy office copier out into a field and beat it with bats - that's how we felt about our old copier. So this is huge for us. It's shiny, brand new, and does things we didn't know a copier could even do (faxing, stapling - whodathunkit?) As with all things non-profit, getting new...

"Poets across America called and e-mailed one another this past weekend, to take in the terrible news that Lucille Clifton died Saturday morning, at the age of seventy-three. Though Clifton surely possessed a cat’s nine lives—she had a transplanted kidney and had fought many bouts with cancer, in various parts of her body—we were still shocked that she had left us, for I do not think there is an American poet as beloved as Clifton, or one whose influence radiated as widely. " This beautiful piece appears "The Book Bench" section of The New Yorker. Read the entire article here:...

Dark Things by Novica Tadic, translated from the Serbian by Charles Simic, has been shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award in Poetry from the translation website Three Percent. Three Percent was "launched in the summer of 2007 with the lofty goal of becoming a destination for readers, editors, and translators interested in finding out about modern and contemporary international literature." The site has quickly become a clearinghouse of information on translations by U.S. publishers, and we are thrilled to be one of the ten finalists for the BTBA in Poetry. The winner will be announced on March 10, 2010....

[caption id="attachment_515" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Lucille Clifton accepting the 2000 National Book Award (AP Photo)"][/caption] Lucille Clifton, Poet Who Explored Intricacies of Black Lives, Dies at 73 Lucille Clifton, a distinguished American poet whose work trained lenses wide and narrow on the experience of being black and female in the 20th century, exploring vast subjects like the indignities of history and intimate ones like the indignities of the body, died on Saturday in Baltimore. She was 73 and lived in Columbia, Md. The precise cause of death had not been determined, her sister, Elaine Philip, told The Associated Press on Sunday....