Ira Sadoff’s TRUE FAITH will appear from BOA in the spring of 2012. He is the author of seven earlier collections of poetry -- including Barter and Grazing -- a novel --  Uncoupling --The Ira Sadoff Reader, and a book of criticism on poetics: History Matters: Contemporary Poetry on the Margins of American Culture. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. His poetry has been widely anthologized, including in Harper American Literature, Great American Prose Poems, and the The Best American Poetry series. His poems and essays appear frequently in The American Poetry Review, where he was awarded the Jerome Shestack Annual Prize for the best poems published in the magazine.

Sadoff has served as poetry editor of The Antioch Review, and was co-founder of The Seneca Review. He has taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and in the M.F.A. programs of the University of Virginia and Warren Wilson College. He currently teaches in the M.F.A. program at Drew University, and serves as the Arthur Jeremiah Roberts Professor of English at Colby College, in Maine.

CELEBRATING THE RELEASE OF True Faith

“Ira Sadoff is a master of language, concentration, of vision, of knowledge, of irony. If there are ten important poets writing in English today, he is one of them.”

--Gerald Stern

"Ira Sadoff’s True Faith both yearns for and calls into question the mechanisms for creating transcendence. He writes, ‘we all have one breath, it’s the same breath’ and our humanness drives us toward a myriad of sins. Each creates for himself a god, be it religious, artistic, economic or political, which brings miracles of beauty into his life. For this poet, imagination is what allows us to ‘walk(s) away from the accident’ and consequently metaphor-making is critiqued in its most natural home. For perhaps it too has been ‘wired wrong.’ These remarkable poems are ultimately profound and unflinching meditations on how to understand all that is lacking in a life remembered. This insightful and timely collection continues to secure his reputation as one of our preeminent poets."

--Claudia Rankine (author of DON'T LET ME BE LONELY)

"Reading this book, I felt the world I live in melt away. Each story is so different from the next, each character a little code to be cracked, each time period and geographical location completely convincing, each life thoroughly absorbing. A strange, illuminating, and compelling book. Like falling into a cloud."

—Monica Wood

Debra Spark is author of the novels Coconuts for the Saint, The Ghost of Bridgetown and Good for the Jews. She edited the best-selling anthology Twenty Under Thirty: Best Stories by America's New Young Writers. Her popular lectures on writing are collected in Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing.  Spark has also written for Esquire, Ploughshares, The New York Times, Food and Wine, Yankee, Down East, The Washington Post, Maine Home + Design and The San Francisco Chronicle, among other places. She has been the recipient of several awards including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Bunting Institute fellowship from Radcliffe College, and the John Zacharis/Ploughshares award for best first book. She is a professor at Colby College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives with her husband and son in North Yarmouth, Maine.

CELEBRATING THE RELEASE OF The Pretty Girl:

 “The Pretty Girl ends exactly as it should (a rare feat), and yet I hated for the novella to be over. Spark is a writer both to admire and to enjoy. Among the pleasures: her sly wit, her deep affection for her characters, her mastery for dialogue, her curiosity about the world, her sheer invention, and the way she seems to effortlessly thread the strands of her stories together. This collection is wonderful company."

— Jane Hamilton