Boor Soirée:
A Digital Poetry Project of
Rural America.
Boor Soirée is a center, an archive, a community.
Stepping out from behind the shadow cast by literary hubs and their creative tastes, Boor Soirée serves as a cultural ethnography of the often-neglected voices working in rural spaces. The digital project is an archive, community, and shape for the future of craft in rural literatures, shining light on the inventions and interventions that project a cultural response to the social, political, and economic realities of the landscapes writers of rural America create within and from.
Join us:
RURAL DEFINED
We take our basic definition of "rural" in the U.S. from the USDA as a town, village, or city with a population of 50,000 or fewer residents, "that is rural in character and not closely associated with an urban or metropolitan area."
More importantly, we understand rurality as the spirit of communities shaped by pressures of natural abundance and sparse metropolitan resources, whether you have grown up in these communities or later moved there.
EXPLORE
Submitting to Boor Soirée
Boor Soirée is accepting essays on craft and scholarly close readings, comparative essays, and statements on the teaching of poetry that engage the intersection of rurality and poetry. Specifically, articles should engage with how rural spaces impact either one’s writing craft or their pedagogy when teaching poetry. We are interested in essays that engage directly with experiences and examples as opposed to discussing these ideas conceptually without application. For craft essays, this includes referencing specific poems; for pedagogical approaches, this includes in-class examples. We are interested in lesson plans that help create access to rural poetics for higher education learners. Complete essays should be between 500 and 5,000 words in length.
Additionally, we accept complete interviews totaling no more than 6,000 words with poets writing from or about rural America in a book that is forthcoming or newly released.
Submit via Submittable.
For Publishers
We publish long-form book interviews and poet spotlight discussions with writers located in rural America who recently published or have forthcoming collections on any subject/theme. If you think you have a book that might be a good fit for one of these features, please send an ARC and contact information for the poet. Though we cannot guarantee a feature to every forthcoming title, we make our best effort to showcase a wide variety of titles from various presses. Send pitches to boorsoiree@gasherpress.com