The Massachusetts Review announces a lecture by Charles M. Sennott, the Executive Editor and Vice President of GlobalPost. Sennott is an award-winning journalist and author with a distinguished career in international reporting for both print and broadcast news organizations. The lecture, “Life, Death, and the Taliban”, will be held on the University of Massachusetts Amherst Campus in Herter Hall Room 231 at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 24, 2010.

An experienced bureau chief, a hard hitting foreign correspondent and an energetic innovator in multimedia, Sennott is uniquely equipped to be a leader in the digital age of international journalism. Through nearly twenty-five years as a reporter and on-air analyst, Sennott has been on the front lines of wars and insurgencies in fifteen countries from the jungles of Colombia to the deserts of Iraq. He has covered a wide range of stories from the papal transition in Rome to the oil industry in Saudi Arabia. A long-time foreign correspondent for The Boston Globe, Sennott served as the Globe's Middle East Bureau Chief based in Jerusalem from 1997 to 2001 and as Europe Bureau Chief based in London from 2001 to 2005. In 2005, Sennott returned to his native New England when he was awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University. In fall 2006, he returned to the Globe newsroom as a Staff Writer for Special Projects. Since then, Sennott has been a leader on a multimedia team that combines writing with still photography as well as audio and video in an effort to produce groundbreaking coverage both online and in the newspaper.

Charles Sennott has also joined the masthead here at MR, serving as one of our Contributing Editors. Stay tuned to hear more from him! Better yet, subscribe now so you don't miss anything!

Newpages gave a fantastic review of MR's Winter issue (Volume 50, Issue 4) featuring Will Barnet works and an accompanying essay by Tom Dumm. Also noted in the review were our Pushcart Nominees Melinda Moustakis and Jung Yun. Read the review! Buy a copy of the issue!

The editors of the Massachusetts Review are proud to announce that the winner of this year’s Anne Halley Poetry Prize is Donald Morrill for his poem “Enemy Infant,” published in the journal’s Fall 2009 issue (5003).

Donald Morrill is the author of two volumes of poetry, At the Bottom of the Sky and With Your Back to Half the Day, as well as four books of nonfiction: The Untouched Minutes (winner of the River Teeth Nonfiction Prize), Sounding for Cool, A Stranger’s Neighborhood, and, most recently, Impetuous Sleeper. His work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies, and his honors include the Mid-List Press First Series Award, the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Award, the Emerging Writers of Creative Nonfiction Award from Duquesne University Press, and The Missouri Review Editors’ Prize for Nonfiction.

This year's reading will take place at Amherst Books, in downtown Amherst, March 11, 2010, at 8:00 p.m. The prize and reading are sponsored by the Massachusetts Review, the English Department of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the family and friends of Anne Halley. Check out the broadside of the winning poem here.

This reading is handicap accessible, free, and open to the public For further information, contact: Aaron Hellem, managing editor, massrev@external.umass.edu, 413-545-2689.

MR nominated six terrific works from our Volume 50 for this year's Pushcart Prize!! From our double 50th Anniversary Issue, we nominated Chase Twichell's dynamite poem Sayonara Marijuana Mon Amour and Brigit Pegeen Kelly's superb poem The Wisdom of Solomon. Also, from the third issue of Volume 50, we nominated The Devil and the Rose, a story by Semezdin Mehmedinovic´, translated by MR's own Jim Hicks. From our fourth issue, two wonderful stories commanded nominations: Jung Yun's The Strange Genius of American Men and Melinda Moustakis' This One Isn’t Going to Be Afraid; our final nomination went to Scott Henkle's terrific essay On the Diffculty of Distinguishing between the Buildings Used to Keep the Foodstuffs and Those Associated with the Dead. Please click on the links to read these top-shelf works!