Belle Boggs

Wyatt Outlaw’s story was one of Black success: He was a Union League leader, business owner, and the first Black town constable and commissioner in Graham, a small town located in North Carolina’s Alamance County. But in 1870, Outlaw was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan, setting off a dramatic series of events: more lynchings, a Republican-led “war” against the Klan, and a white supremacist crackdown on Black political power that continues today. As a child, Black activist, musician, and Graham native Sylvester Allen frequently passed the site where Outlaw was killed without ever learning his name. Belle Boggs, white and also from the South, taught high school in Alamance County without knowing Outlaw’s importance. Allen and Boggs both sought to discover why Outlaw had been erased from mainstream history books. In The Legend of Wyatt Outlaw, they share what they found in artful detail and connect Outlaw’s story to the violence against Black people in Alamance and throughout the United States, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow, the civil rights era, and Black Lives Matter. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and their own personal stories, Allen and Boggs join the conversation begun by historian Peniel Joseph and activist William Barber II about a third Reconstruction in America, but they also offer ways to move forward for any community struggling with a history of racism.

Eight-year-old Beatrice Boggs Allen (along with her mom, Belle Boggs) introduces the 28 easiest and most fascinating houseplants that any kid can grow indoors. Maybe every kid can't have an animal pet--but everyone can have a plant pet! That's the message of eight-year-old author and houseplant enthusiast Beatrice (Bea) Boggs Allen. In this friendly book written specially for kids, Bea tells all about the easiest, most fun, and affordable plants that can be grown indoors in pots. She shares her first-hand tips on caring for each plant, along with descriptions of each one's unique attributes, from air plants to succulents, terrariums, and even carnivorous plants--the ones that eat insects! The lively pages show up-close photos of each plant, along with funny illustrations that reflect Bea's cheeky voice. Kids ages 7 and up will love Bea's ideas for activities they can do to enjoy these amazing plants and share them with friends and family.

A hilarious send-up of writing workshops, for-profit education, and the gulf between believers and nonbelievers Marianne is in a slump: barely able to support herself by teaching, not making progress on her poetry, about to lose her Brooklyn apartment. When her novelist ex-fianc , Eric, and his venture capitalist brother, Mark, offer her a job directing a low-residency school for Christian writers at a motel they've inherited on Florida's Gulf Coast, she can't come up with a reason to say no. The Genesis Inspirational Writing Ranch is born, and liberal, atheist Marianne is soon knee-deep in applications from writers whose political and religious beliefs she has always opposed but whose money she's glad to take. Janine is a schoolteacher whose heartfelt poems explore the final days of Terri Schiavo's life. Davonte is a former R&B superstar who hopes to reboot his career with a bestselling tale of excess and redemption. Lorraine and Tom, eccentric writers in need of paying jobs, join the Ranch as instructors. Mark finds an investor in God's Word God's World, a business that develops for-profit schools for the Christian market, but the conditions that come along with their support become increasingly problematic, especially as Marianne grows closer to the students. As unsavory allegations mount, a hurricane bears down on the Ranch, and Marianne is faced with the consequences of her decisions. With sharp humor and deep empathy, The Gulf is a memorable debut novel in which Belle Boggs plumbs the troubled waters dividing America.

In this collection of her finest and best-known short essays, Natalia Ginzburg explores both the mundane details and inescapable catastrophes of personal life with the grace and wit that have assured her rightful place in the pantheon of classic mid-century authors. Whether she writes of the loss of a friend, Cesare Pavese; or what is inexpugnable of World War II; or the Abruzzi, where she and her first husband lived in forced residence under Fascist rule; or the importance of silence in our society; or her vocation as a writer; or even a pair of worn-out shoes, Ginzburg brings to her reflections the wisdom of a survivor and the spare, wry, and poetically resonant style her readers have come to recognize. "A glowing light of modern Italian literature . . . Ginzburg's magic is the utter simplicity of her prose, suddenly illuminated by one word that makes a lightning streak of a plain phrase. . . . As direct and clean as if it were carved in stone, it yet speaks thoughts of the heart.' — The New York Times Book Review

A brilliant exploration of the natural, medical, psychological, and political facets of fertility When Belle Boggs's The Art of Waiting was published in Orion in 2012, it went viral, leading to republication in Harper's Magazine, an interview on NPR's The Diane Rehm Show, and a spot at the intersection of highbrow and brilliant in New York magazine's Approval Matrix. In that heartbreaking essay, Boggs eloquently recounts her realization that she might never be able to conceive. She searches the apparently fertile world around her--the emergence of thirteen-year cicadas, the birth of eaglets near her rural home, and an unusual gorilla pregnancy at a local zoo--for signs that she is not alone. Boggs also explores other aspects of fertility and infertility: the way longing for a child plays out in the classic Coen brothers film Raising Arizona; the depiction of childlessness in literature, from Macbeth to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; the financial and legal complications that accompany alternative means of family making; the private and public expressions of iconic writers grappling with motherhood and fertility. She reports, with great empathy, complex stories of couples who adopted domestically and from overseas, LGBT couples considering assisted reproduction and surrogacy, and women and men reflecting on childless or child-free lives. In The Art of Waiting, Boggs deftly distills her time of waiting into an expansive contemplation of fertility, choice, and the many possible roads to making a life and making a family.

Winner of the 2009 Bakeless Fiction Prize, a confident debut collection from Belle Boggs about life on and around the Mattaponi Indian Reservation Set on the Mattaponi Indian Reservation and in its surrounding counties, the stories in this linked collection detail the lives of rural men and women with stark realism and plainspoken humor. A young military couple faces a future shadowed by injury and untold secrets. A dying alcoholic attempts to reconcile with his estranged children. And an elderly woman's nurse weathers life with her irascible charge by making payments on a decrepit houseboat--the Mattaponi Queen. The land is parceled into lots, work opportunities are few, and the remaining inhabitants must choose between desire and necessity as they navigate the murky stream of possession, love, and everything in between.