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February 11, 2025

An Interview with Naima Yael Tokunow, Editor of Permanent Record

Permanent Record: Poetics Towards the Archive is an interrogation of the archive—its forms, failures, and alternative frequencies—featuring contributions from Douglas Kearney, Brenda Shaughnessy, and others. The editor, Naima Yael Tokunow—Nightboat’s inaugural Editorial Fellow—comes to the project having had to reckon with the Black American Record while researching her own familial history. What she found was an absence of “legitimate” records, though an abundance of those considered “illegitimate”—a distinction she troubles to ask, “How do we reject, interpolate, and (re)create the archive and record?” The answers abound. In our conversation below we discuss the archive, its discontents, and the anthology—which allows the past to…

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News | Interviews |
December 24, 2024

Remembering Michael Burkard (1947-2024)

Nightboat Books mourns the passing of our author and founding advisory board member Michael Burkard, who died on December 23, 2024, at the age of 77. Burkard was the author of several books of poetry, including two from Nightboat: lucky coat anywhere (2011) and Envelope of Night: Selected and Uncollected Poems, 1966–1990 (2008). His other collections include Unsleeping (2001), Pennsylvania Collection Agency (2001), Entire Dilemma (1998), My Secret Boat (1990), Fictions from the Self (1980), and Ruby for Grief (1982). He was the recipient of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award and the Whiting Writers’ Award, as well as fellowships…

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News |
December 10, 2024

Announcing the 2025 Nightboat Editorial Fellow!

We are thrilled to announce that we have selected Terry Hudson as our 2025 Editorial Fellow! Nightboat's Editorial Fellowship is designed to provide an aspiring BIPOC editor with $10,000, along with the resources and mentorship…

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Interviews |
October 31, 2024

An Interview with Eleni Stecopoulos, Author of Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing

Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing—by Eleni Stecopoulos, out now from Nightboat—intervenes in our cultural, historical, and political narratives around healing, which Stecopoulos imagines as a "collective orchestration." The work combines cultural criticism, collaborative research, and poetic practice, all set in the context of our contemporary moment—one wherein life is commanded, consumed, made collateral. In our conversation below we discuss the project's origins and inspirations, from antiquity to the present; language as "neither defense nor apology"; and the distinction between the chronic and the acute, which Stecopoulos troubles to ask, “How do people create spaces of solidarity and care…

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Nat RahaInterviews |
October 15, 2024

An Interview with Nat Raha, Author of apparitions (nines)

Out today from Nightboat Books, Nat Raha’s apparitions (nines) mixes lament with liberatory outcry. Raha’s poems live in the first-person plural, pushing against “authors who could not / conceive us,” a collective self-organizing and self-formalizing into “a threat to the tone & / image” of neoliberal politics. Dancing through the constraint of the niner form, apparitions plays with punctuation as a syllable, a visual cue, and an intercession against Anglophone lyric. We discuss this new poetic form, Raha’s political and performance practice, and more in the conversation below. —Morgan Levine Morgan Levine: This book is a series of “niners,” poems with 9…

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Interviews |
October 1, 2024

An Interview with Oliver Baez Bendorf, author of Consider the Rooster

Consider the Rooster—out today from Nightboat Books—is a collection that both celebrates and challenges the pastoral. The titular rooster refers to one Bendorf cared for amid the COVID-19 pandemic, whose crow could “scare away the devil and rouse the dead back to life,” and whose presence led a neighbor to call the police. The response—a carceral one—led to a radical shift in his political and poetic life.  We discuss that shift in our conversation below, and the call to "slow down, pay attention, and tend to what remains." —Dante Silva Dante Silva: I’m interested in the literary lineage of the rooster; you reference…

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