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 . . .
A light split the room where Rubén Darío was trying to write. On that side, a copy of Don Quixote; on this side, the untrimmed sheets of paper with words crossed out and the unread letter from a young poet in search of guidance and assistance. —from Mark Schafer’s translation of David . . .
I greet an ancient refrigerator,once my father, now reduced to bare bones, yetit remains unbearably heavy. —from Jack Saebyok Jung’s translation of Heeum’s “The Use of a Window” (Volume 66, issue 3) Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.One of the earliest pieces I translated was a poem by . . .
“Brianna80.” I like the round number, eighty. 4s, 8s, multiples of 10, a number I would have written as a child on and on, practicing my numbers: 8 then 0 then 8 then 0, looping like kids holding hands in a playground. The number eighty, attached to the temporary name Bri-anna, was . . .
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.
