On May 8th, MR and Amherst Books hosted our 2025 Anne Halley Poetry Prize winner Chard deNiord for a reading.
IN 1964, A SHORT STORY titled “Mississippi Ham Rider” appeared in the summer issue of the Massachusetts Review. Authored by a young writer named Toni Cade, the story follows Inez Williams, a copywriter who has traveled south to interview an old blues singer named Ham Rider. She has also been charged with . . .
HE IS A MAN of stories, and of music. He would scoff to hear me say he has an artistic bent; his verdict on himself is that he lacks imagination. In other matters, too, he has the habit of self-effacement. And yet he’s bold, on the verge of overbearing, when marshaling evidence. He . . .
Photo credit: Rebekkah Drake “Help!” I yell, because I am clearly not qualified to deal with an unresponsive Tony Robbins. I am qualified to bring in hummus and in a couple, maybe three, years to teach high school social studies or history or whatever, if I can get back and finish my . . .
l. to r. Frank Corcoran, US Marine Corps, Purple Heart in Vietnam; Mike Felker, US Navy Corpsman assigned to Marine Corps infantry in Vietnam; Art Sharon, US Air Force, Vietnam-era; Bill Ehrhart, US Marine Corps, Purple Heart in Vietnam; Gene Cleaver, US Marine Corps, Purple Heart in Vietnam. Photo courtesy of Mike Felker. . . .
ALAN GROSTEPHAN is the author of The Banana Wars and Bogotá, a novel chosen by the Wall Street Journal as one of the best ten books of fiction in 2013 and longlisted for the Pen/Robert W. Bingham Prize. He is also the editor and translator of Stories of Life and Death, a collection of writing by emerging Colombian writers.
