Renia White is the author of Casual Conversation (BOA Editions, 2022), a Blessing the Boats Selection chosen by Editor-at-Large Aracelis Girmay. Originally from PG County, Maryland, her family relocated to the southside of Atlanta the same year she turned 13. She went on to earn her BA from Howard University and her MFA from Cornell University where she also taught. A BOAAT fellow, she received the 2015 Hurston/Wright Foundation College Writers Award in poetry. Her work appears in publications such as The Offing, Slice, Witness, Southern Indiana Review, and elsewhere. She lives and works in New York City.
Aracelis Girmay is a poet and editor from Santa Ana, California. Her books include the black maria, Teeth, Kingdom Animalia, the collage-based picture book changing, changing, and she was the editor of How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton. A recipient of numerous grants, awards, and fellowships in support of her work from the Whiting Foundation, the NEA, the Cave Canem Foundation, and others, she is currently the Editor-at-Large of the Blessing the Boats Selections within BOA’s American Poets Continuum Series.