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In this installment of UC Berkeley’s Lunch Poems series, Aracelis Girmay begins with a reading of “Poem of Commitment” by June Jordan followed by a selection of poems from her collections The Black Maria (BOA Editions, 2016) and Green of All Heads (BOA Editions, 2025).
This short film produced by Boa Editions and Hunger Media highlights the life and career of Lucille Clifton and how her work continues to influence and inspire the poetry community, including Boa’s Blessing the Boats Selections series. For more on the press’s work, read “Poetry to Save Us: Boa at 50” in the March/April 2026 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In this Poetry.LA video, Lynne Thompson, author most recently of Blue on a Blue Palette (BOA Editions, 2024), and Séamus Isaac Fey, author of the debut collection, decompose (Not a Cult, 2024), read from their work and speak about playing with poetic form and organizing poetry manuscripts.
Jan-Henry Gray talks about recipe poems and the structural parallels between poetry and cooking in this short film by Talia Sadie Feder. Gray’s debut poetry collection, Documents (BOA Editions, 2019), is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“There are days we live / as if death were nowhere / in the background from joy / to joy to joy, from wing to wing,” reads Li-Young Lee from his poem “From Blossoms,” included in his debut collection, Rose (BOA Editions, 1986), for this installment of Poetry Breaks, a series created by Leita Luchetti in the 1980s and 1990s presented in partnership with the Academy of American Poets.
“Listen to me. I am telling you / a true thing. This is the only kingdom.” In this installment of Ours Poetica, a series produced by the Poetry Foundation in collaboration with Complexly, chef and author of Salt Fat Acid Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking Samin Nosrat reads Aracelis Girmay’s poem “Elegy.”
“The next time you stop speaking, / ask yourself why you were born,” reads Naomi Shihab Nye from her poem “Separation Wall” in this episode of Ours Poetica, a series produced by the Poetry Foundation in collaboration with Complexly.
“To me, it always comes back to, ‘What are the real questions that I want to ask through the piece?’ And then it becomes an act, not so much of representation...but it’s more a matter of discovery.” In this 2019 episode of The Poetry Vlog, Chen Chen reads the titular poem from his collection, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), and discusses the process of expressing vulnerability authentically on the page. For more Chen, read his series of Craft Capsule essays.
“I want to say I was waiting but I don’t know what I was waiting for.” In this video, Barbara Jane Reyes reads from her poetry collection Letters to a Young Brown Girl (BOA Editions, 2020) for the Well-RED reading series, presented in partnership with Poetry Center San José at Works/San José community art and performance center. The collection is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Jillian Weise reads her poems “Semi Semi Dash,” “Café Loop,” and “Poem for His Girl,” from her second collection, The Book of Goodbyes (BOA Editions, 2013), at the Academy of American Poets’ 2013 Poets Forum Awards Ceremony. Weise’s third collection, Cyborg Detective (BOA Editions, 2019), is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
