BOA Editions Publisher Peter Conners stops by to talk about the 40 years of BOA Editions. We discuss the growth of the press, the early years, and the future of the publishing. Also, the brilliant Janice Harrington calls into to talk about her latest book Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace Pippin, a fascinating collection that examines the life of this important artist.
About Peter Conners:
Peter Conners was born September 11, 1970 in Rochester, New York. He is the author of several collections of poetry and fiction including The Crows Were Laughing in their Trees (poetry), Of Whiskey and Winter (poetry), the novella Emily Ate the Wind, and PP/FF: An Anthology (editor). His memoir, Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead, was published by Da Capo Press in April 2009. His nonfiction books are, White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary & Allen Ginsberg (City Lights, 2010) and JAMerica: An Oral History of the Jam Band Scene (Da Capo Press, Fall 2013). Peter lives with his wife and three children in Rochester, NY. In addition to his writing, he is Publisher of the non-profit literary publisher, BOA Editions.
About Janice Harrington:
Janice N. Harrington writes poetry and children’s books. She grew up in Alabama and Nebraska, and both those settings, especially rural Alabama, figure largely in her writing. Her first book of poetry, Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone (2007), won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize from BOA Editions and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her second book of poetry, The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home, came out in 2011, and her third book, Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippin, is scheduled to appear in October 2016. She is also the winner of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for Poetry and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award for emerging women writers. Her children’s books, The Chicken Chasing Queen of Lamar County (2007) and Going North (2004), both from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, have won many awards and citations, including a listing among TIME Magazine’s top 10 children’s books and the Ezra Jack Keats Award from the New York Public Library. Harrington’s poetry appears regularly in American literary magazines. She has worked as a public librarian and now teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Illinois.