Chen Chen will be in conversation with author and poet Peter Conners, Publisher and Executive Director of BOA Editions. Portrait by Margarita Corporan In his highly anticipated second collection of poems, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency, Chen Chen continues his investigation of family, both blood and chosen, examining what one inherits and what […]
Behind the Curtain: View Eyechart, then join us for artist Ellen Driscoll’s talk on her creative process. Admission is free. Gift donations are appreciated. The gallery talk will also be streamed via Zoom. The link will be in your email confirmation. Choose the ticket price that’s right for you: Free, $5, $10, $15 or $20
Cynthia Dewi Oka will be in conversation with author and poet Peter Conners, Publisher and Executive Director of BOA Editions. In her fourth poetry collection, Cynthia Dewi Oka performs a lyric accounting of the anti-Communist genocide of 1965, which, led by the Indonesian military and with American assistance, erased and devastated millions of lives in […]
In the aftermath of the Stand Your Ground killing of his close friend’s father, Cassells explores the brutality, bigotry, and betrayal at the heart of current America. Taking his cue from Civil Rights- and Vietnam War-era poets and songwriters who inspired him in his youth, he presents a frank, bulletin-fierce indictment of unraveling democracy in […]
Sponsored by Friends & Foundation of the Rochester Public Library Central Library of Rochester & Monroe County Kate Gleason Auditorium 115 South Avenue, Rochester, NY 14604 Free Admission | ASL Interpretation Register at Library here. Can't attend in person? Watch the live stream, posted to the Library's YouTube Channel The video will remain posted and […]
Sponsored by St. John Fisher University St. John Fisher University Kearney Hall, Cleary Family Auditorium 3690 East Avenue Rochester, NY 14618 In-person | Registration required | ASL Interpretation Doors open at 7 pm Click for larger image Parking: Lot A via main campus entrance See #16 on campus map Kearney Hall is up […]
Matt Donovan will be in conversation with author and poet Peter Conners, Publisher and Executive Director of BOA Editions. The Dug-Up Gun Museum confronts our country’s obsession with guns to explore America’s deep-seated political divisions and issues linked to violence, race, power, and privilege. Taking its title from an actual museum located in Wyoming, this […]
Craig Morgan Teicher will be in conversation with author and poet Peter Conners, Publisher and Executive Director of BOA Editions. A seminal voice in American prose poetry from the sixties onward, Russell Edson’s (1935-2014) career is surveyed in a single volume edited for our times, presenting a new and contemporary view of a poet of […]
Luther Hughes will be in conversation with author and poet Peter Conners, Publisher and Executive Director of BOA Editions. A Shiver in the Leaves is stunningly cinematic in its layered portrayal of the never-ending dualities of a queer Black poet’s life in the city. Hughes's interrogation of selfhood renders a sharply intimate and viscerally powerful […]
Carley Moore will be in conversation with Sejal Shah. It’s early summer in New York City, 2020. The city is largely shut down, and Orpheus—our queer, disabled, poly hero—is lonely, devoid of touch and community. Orpheus manages to buy a bike just before they sell out and takes to the streets looking for Eurydice, the […]
Nishant Batsha will be in conversation with Joshua Dubler Spanning from the lush terrain of the South Pacific to the golden hills of San Francisco, Mother Ocean Father Nation is an entrancing debut about how one family, at the mercy of a nation broken by legacies of power and oppression, forges a path to find […]
“A new book by M.J. Iuppa is always a treat, and The Weight of Air is one of her finest. . .these exquisitely crafted, concise poems are full of quiet surprises and keen observations. Both the pandemic and the author’s own health crisis contribute to the book’s twin emphases on mortality and on nature’s bounty.” […]
In Seaburn’s most recent novel, the dual challenges of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and the unexplained loss of parents are the driving forces behind the lives of two boys and their grandfather. Over time, intergenerational connections between family members and friends create the shelter the book’s characters need for their common journey. This is […]
Popular narratives of American history conceal as much as they reveal. In Whose Ruins tells another story: winding through the US landscape, from Native American earthworks in West Virginia to the Manhattan Project in New Mexico, this history is a tour of sites that were mined for an empire’s power. Showing the hidden costs of ruthless […]
Emerging from the intersection of pandemic and uprising, the déjà vu activates forms both new and ancestral, drawing movement, speech, and lyric essay into performance memoir. As Civil considers Haitian tourist paintings, dance rituals, race at the movies, black feminist legacies, and more, she reflects on her personal losses and desires, speculates on black time, […]
Comprised of four heroic crowns of sonnets, Alicia Mountain’s Four in Hand is both formal and experimental, ranging from lyric romantic and familial narratives to blank verses of reconfigured found text pulled from financial newsletter emails. Language and white space equally captivate with their sparsity and abundance as Mountain pursues the implications of national political […]
Selected by Stephanie Burt as the winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize, Good Grief, the Ground interrogates the everyday violences nonchalantly inflicted onto women through personal, political, and national lenses. Moving between adolescence and adulthood, Ray alternates between dark humor and heart-wrenching honesty to explore grief, anxiety, queer longing, girlhood, escape from the […]
In this quietly mesmerizing novel, no one, including the protagonist, is ever entirely sure of their motivations. Existing in the liminal spaces between altruism and greed, This Room Is Made of Noise deftly explores the shades of gray that lie between our desires and our demons. “Everything you want in a novel: exquisitely imagined, big-hearted, […]
Told through personal, national, and cultural histories, Buffalo Girl is a feminist indictment of the violence used to define and control women’s bodies. Interspersed throughout this hybrid work are a series of collaged photographs featuring Stark’s mother’s black-and-white photography from Vietnam, beautifully and hauntingly layered over various natural landscapes—lush tropical plants, dense forests, pockets of […]
What makes a powerful sentence? How do you write sentences that worm their way into the ear and propel the reader forward? In this workshop, we'll analyze the anatomy of compelling sentences by looking at a range of authors, including Christine Schutt, Michael Ondaatje, and Jamaica Kincaid. You will have time and opportunity to practice […]
Shiferraw calls us to carve out space for the multitudes of selves we carry when we migrate across boundaries of body, language, and land. With momentum, giving name to everything in her path from the longing that comes with migration to her beloved eucalyptus tree, she blurs physical and temporal borders, paying homage to ancestors […]
The linked stories in Mama Said are set in Louisville, Kentucky, a city with a rich history steeped in tobacco, bourbon, and gambling, indulgences that can quickly become gripping and destructive vices. Set amid the tail end of the crack epidemic and the rise of the opioid crisis, Mama Said evokes Black family life in […]
Against a constellation of solar weather events and an evolving pandemic, Flare, Corona paints a self-portrait of the ways in which we prevail and persevere through health adversities while facing an uncertain future. Gailey juxtaposes eclipses and hurricanes with a body’s many medical challenges, including neurological symptoms, highlighting the miraculous while melding the personal with […]
Dripping with Southern gothic flavors, The Visibility of Things Long Submerged gazes at the holy and the obscene while plumbing gritty secrets of the human heart. With swamps, alligators, revival tents, faith healers, sex, death, guilt, sin and snakes, Looney leads us through a dark landscape brimming with the miraculous and the peculiar alike. Densely […]
