What makes a Boa book?
For corporate publishing houses, it’s not really in their wheelhouse to publish work based solely on artistic merit. We only publish 12 books a year. If we wanted to, we could shotgun out 50 books a year, but the way I look at it is then we would be printing books as opposed to publishing them. When you’re holding a Boa book, just know that out of 1,000-plus submissions in any given year, that book was one of the 12. It also puts us in a really good position to find the next generation of poets and get their work into the world.
How are you grappling with the loss of NEA funding?
Boa was in the first group of publishers to be funded by the NEA in the early ’80s. To lose it after 40 solid years has been a big blow, not just to us but to other independent publishers. Literary nonprofits receive only 2% of the giving that goes toward cultural institutions, and part of the reason is that I don’t think we’ve done a good enough job telling our story. Now is the time for us to speak up and carve out a little bit more of that pie for ourselves. Right now, we’re putting together a documentary about Boa for the 50th anniversary.
What’s next?
I want to see us continue expanding the range of voices we publish. We started a series in 2020 called Blessing the Boat Selections, specifically to publish collections by women of color. There are a lot of active attempts to suppress those voices, and that’s something that we want to strike against.
