Rochester, NY—BOA Editions is pleased to announce that India Lena González’s fox woman get out! is the next Blessing the Boats Selections title. Ms. González will receive a $5,000 honorarium and her manuscript will be published in September 2023 as part of the New Poets of America Series. fox woman get out! was selected by Blessing the Boats Selections Editor-at-Large Aracelis Girmay from a pool of ninety-six submissions.
“This season, we received an extraordinary number of brilliant submissions for the Blessing the Boats Selections,” said Girmay. “The selection process was exceptionally difficult and I feel very honored and moved to have experienced such a range of vision and work. I am also completely thrilled to share that the next Blessing the Boats Selection will be India Lena González’s fox woman get out! This book is so alive, polyvocal, and in its POWERS—I am enlivened by the encounter. We follow the capacious vision of the shapeshifting fox woman as she conjures language(s) shiftful enough to carry her multiplicities. With urgency, she carries and tries to carry the ancestors, and it is this effortful trying—across strategies, actions, sounds, and registers—that I find so interesting. As in: ‘WHAT PLANTS? / WHERE ARE MY ELDERS? / FIND THEM. BRING ME BACK MY INFORMATION.’ I think it is an exquisite text/performance/sounding—its own thing. And also touching in me Jayne Cortez and Ntozake Shange and Amiri Baraka to name a few. fox woman get out! is a happening which, to me, feels like a commitment to trying for an unending sound. In ‘let me grow this spirit mouth ( alas ),’ India Lena González writes: ‘if u wnt to come in yull hv to dig a hole & sit’ and then later: ‘(wade in mthr) (a las(t)).’”
India Lena González is a poet, editor, and artist. She received her BA from Columbia University, where she graduated with honors, and her MFA from NYU’s Creative Writing program. While at NYU she served as a writing instructor for undergraduates and received a Writers in the Public Schools fellowship enabling her to teach literature to middle school students via Teachers & Writers Collaborative. Her work is published in Poets & Writers Magazine, American Chordata, The Brooklyn Review, PANK, Pigeon Pages, Lampblack, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry, among others. A three-time National Poetry Series finalist, India is also a professionally trained dancer, choreographer, and actor. She lives in Harlem.
Named after celebrated poet Lucille Clifton’s National Book Award-winning collection Blessing the Boats, and in recognition of her enduring legacy, The Blessing the Boats Selections spotlights poetry collections by women of color. Previous Blessing the Boats Selections titles include A Tinderbox in Three Acts by Cynthia Dewi Oka, Casual Conversation by Renia White, Year of the Dog by Deborah Paredez and Letters to a Young Brown Girl by Barbara Jane Reyes. The Blessing the Boats Selections are generously supported by the Lannan Foundation and the Amazon Literary Partnership.
The next open reading period for the Blessing the Boats Selections will be from June 1 – July 14, 2023. Submission details are available at boaeditions.org/pages/blessing-the-boats-selections.
