BOA History:
Since its founding in 1976, BOA has published more than 300 books of American poetry, poetry-in-translation, and short fiction. The first publication bearing the BOA imprint was The Fuhrer Bunker: A Cycle of Poems in Progress by W. D. Snodgrass. The Fuhrer Bunker received tremendous critical attention and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, optioned for the stage by Joseph Papp, and produced by Wynn Handman for The American Place Theater. In 1984, BOA published Carolyn Kizer's Yin, a collection of poems that had been turned down by nearly every major publishing house. Yin won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1985. One year later, BOA published Rose by Li-Young Lee, who at that time was an unknown poet. He went on to publish five more books with BOA and is one of America’s most widely-read poets. Another extremely prominent BOA poet, Naomi Shihab Nye, joined BOA’s poetry list with her collection, Fuel, in 1994. She has gone on to publish 4 more lauded collections with BOA Editions, garnering such awards as the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Best Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Writers' League of Texas Book Awards for Poetry, among many others.