Energies and autoionization widths are presented for autoionizing states in Li I, Be II and B III lying between the 1s 2 and the 1s2s 3 S ionization limits. A configuration interaction expansion combined with a B-spline basis set has been used to compute the properties of the lowest 2 S e , 2 P o and 2 D e states which are, in the LS approximation, the only terms allowed to autoionize. The comparison with theoretical and experimental data shows the high accuracy of the present approach applied to singly core-excited states. The error on the energies is found, in the case of Li I, to be well below 10 meV in general, while for Be II and B III, for which much less is known, the present results point to the need for more accurate measurements. Several new identifications have been made and some identifications revised in the experimental data. For autoionization widths, the comparison with experimental and theoretical data shows that the monoconfigurational HF description of the 1s 2 limit employed here provides a good approximation although, for Li I, some of the differences with experimental measurements can be related to the lack of correlation in the wavefunction used to describe the limit.