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 . . .
You must be very tallto love the dark. You needsturdy legs and a heartthat struggles just enoughto bring your blood about themand raise it again to your head.You must feel in your chestthe finite days of its function.—from Dan Rosenberg’s “To Love the Dark,” Volume 66, Issue 2 (Summer 2025) Tell us . . .
I could not bless. I could not bleed.My body was hers from first tolast. To not say bruise or burntand when the neighbor lay medown and unbuttoned me one by one, I did not pray. I did not ask or say.—from Jessica Cuello’s “My Mother’s Daughter,” Volume 65, Issue 3 (Fall 2024) . . .
Are they pigeons? Fifth floor, other side ofthis giant window I know by heart theircomings/goings, their stayings-put on the still—from “The Pigeons,” Volume 66, Issue 2 (Summer 2025) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote. I wouldn’t call them poems really but as I walked home from St. Eugene’s School . . .
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.
