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THE ANNE HALLEY PRIZE

HISTORY AND INFORMATION

Anne Halley was for twenty-five years Poetry Editor of MR, had a long association with the English Department, and was author of three distinctive volumes of verse and many prize-winning stories, while enjoying a long career as a beloved teacher in the U.S. and abroad. 

The Anne Halley Poetry Prize is co-sponsored by the Massachusetts Review and the English Department of the University of Massachusetts/Amherst. A Prize of $500 is awarded annually for the best poem to appear in the preceding year of MR, as chosen by two editors and a member of the English Department. The prize poet is invited to give a spring reading in Amherst.


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2023 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize

- By Staff

Congratulations to MEGAN PINTO, winner of this year's Anne Halley Poetry Prize!

Nathan McClain and Franny Choi have selected Megan Pinto's poem "Chiaroscuro after Caravaggio’s Paul" from MR's Summer 2022 issue (Vol.63, Issue 2) for the prestigious prize.

MEGAN PINTO is a writer living in Brooklyn. Her poems can be found or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Lit Hub, Plume, and elsewhere. She has received scholarships and fellowships from Bread Loaf, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers. Megan holds an MFA...


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2022 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize

- By Emily Wojcik

The 2022 winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize is Robert Whitehead, for his poem "David" (Volume 62, Issue 1).

ROBERT WHITEHEAD received his MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, and has been a fellow at the Bucknell...


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2021 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize

- By Emily Wojcik

The 2021 winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize is Abigail Chabitnoy, for her poem "Girls Are Coming out of the Water," from our Gathering of Native Voices issue (Volume 61, Issue 4).

ABIGAIL CHABITNOY is the author of How to Dress a Fish (Wesleyan 2019), winner of the 2020 Colorado Book Award for Poetry and shortlisted in the international category of the 2020 Griffin Prize for Poetry. She was a 2016 Peripheral Poets fellow, and her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Boston Review, Tin House, Gulf Coast, LitHub, and Red Ink, among others. Most recently, she was the recipient of the Witter Bynner Funded Native Poet Residency at Elsewhere Studios in Paonia, CO, and is a mentor for the...


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2020 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize

- By Edward Clifford

The 2020 winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize is Samuel Taylor for his poem "Postcards from Babel," published in Volume 60, Issue 1.

Sam Taylor is the author of three books of poems, Body of the World (Ausable), Nude Descending an Empire (Pitt Poetry Series), and the forthcoming The Book of Fools: An Essay in Memoir and Verse (Negative Capability). A native of Miami and a former caretaker of a wilderness refuge in New Mexico, he currently tends a wild garden in Kansas, where he directs the MFA Program at Wichita State. His poems have appeared in such journals as The...


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2019 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize

- By Emily Wojcik

The 2019 winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize is Amit Majmudar for his poem, "Invasive Species," published in Volume 59, Issue 4.

Join us for a celebratory reading at Amherst Books on Thursday, April 4, at 7 p.m. Free and open to the public.

Amit Majmudar's next books are Soar: A Novel and Kill List: Poems. His most recent book is Godsong: A Verse Translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, with Commentary. He has served as Ohio's first Poet Laureate and works as a diagnostic nuclear radiologist in Westerville, OH, where he lives with his wife and three...


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2018 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize

- By Mass Review

The 2018 winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize is Katie Farris for her poem, "The Lords of Time," published in Volume 58, Issue 4.

Katie Farris is the author of Thirteen Intimacies, forthcoming from Fivehundred Places, and boysgirls. She has cotranslated several books of poetry from French, Chinese, and Russian. Her work has appeared in anthologies and Virginia Quarterly Review, Verse, Western Humanities Review, and Massachusetts Review. She is an associate professor in the MFA program at San Diego State University.

Earlier this year, we asked Katie 10 QUESTIONS about her...


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2017 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize

- By

The 2017 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize is Gary J. Whitehead, for his poem, "Music from a Farther Room," published in Volume 57, Issue 4.

Gary J. Whitehead is a poet, teacher, and crossword constructor. His third collection of poems, A Glossary of Chickens, was published by Princeton University Press in 2013. His previous books include Measuring Cubits while the Thunder Claps and The Velocity of Dust. He has also authored three chapbooks of poetry, two of which were winners of national competitions. His writing awards include, among others, a New York Foundation for the...


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2016 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize

- By Mass Review

The 2016 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize is Taije Silverman, for her poem, "Spiritual Evaluation," published in Volume 56, Issue 2.

Taije Silverman is the author of the collection Houses Are Fields, and her poems have been published Poetry, the Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, and AGNI. She received the 2010-11 W.K. Rose Fellowship from Vassar College, and has had residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. In 2010, she was a Fulbright fellow at the University of Bologna. Her...


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2015 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize

- By Mass Review

The 2015 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize is Sarah Sousa, for her poem, "Her Moods Caused Owls," published in Volume 55, Issue 3.

Sarah Sousa’s first collection, Church of Needles, won the 2013 Red Mountain Prize and was published by Red Mountain Press in 2014. Her second collection, Split the Crow, was published January 2015 by Free Verse Editions, an imprint of Parlor Press. She is the editor and transcriber of The Diary of Esther Small, 1886 (Small Batch Books), which won the New England Book Festival award for Regional Literature. Sousa holds an MFA in poetry and literature from Bennington College. Her poetry has...


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2014 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize

- By Mass Review

The 2014 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize is Geffrey Davis, for his poem, "What I Mean When I Say Farmhouse," published in Volume 54, Issue 3.

Geffrey Davis’s debut collection, Revising the Storm, was selected by Dorianne Laux for the 2013 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, and will be published by BOA Editions in April 2014. Part of his work as a literary citizen involves promoting the poetry of others. To this end, he co-created and co-edits the online journal Toe Good Poetry. Davis holds degrees from Oregon State University and Penn State University. His awards include the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, the...


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2013 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize

- By Mass Review

The 2013 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize is Ross Gay, for his poem "Ode to Sleeping in My Clothes," published in Volume 53, Issue 1.

A Cave Canem Fellow, Ross Gay is author of Against Which and Bringing the Shovel Down, the title poem of which enacts this poet’s excruciating extremes of terror and tenderness, and his profound understanding of what it means to be human. Gay’s poems have appeared in American Poetry Review and Ploughshares, among others, and Terrance Hayes dubbed him “some kind of brilliant latter-day troubadour.” An editor with the chapbook press Q Avenue, he teaches poetry at Indiana University...


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2012 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize

- By Mass Review

The 2012 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize is Philip Metres, for his poems "Home/Front" and "Air Aria," published in Volume 52, Issue 3/4.

Philip Metres grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. He graduated from Holy Cross College in 1992, and spent the following year in Russia on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, pursuing an independent project called "Contemporary Russian Poetry and Its Response to Historical Change." Metres went to Indiana University, where he received a Ph.D. in English and an M.F.A. in...


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2011 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize

- By Mass Review

The 2011 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize is Joanne Dominique Dwyer for her poem Bull's-eye

Volume 51, Issue 2

Joanne Dominique Dwyer was born and raised in New York State, but has lived in New Mexico for most of her adult life where she studied and practiced Acupuncture for a number of years before working in a family construction business while raising her two children. Dwyer began writing poetry and fiction through a community college class, which led for a brief time to participation and involvement in spoken word venues such as the Taos Poetry Circus and other collaborative ventures with visual artists and musicians. She...


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2010 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize

- By Mass Review

The 2010 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize is Donald Morrill for his poem Enemy Infant

Volume 50, Issue 3

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...


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2009 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize

- By Mass Review

The 2009 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize is Marilyn Hacker for her poems Ghazal: min al-hobbi ma khatal, and Ghazal: dar al-harb

Volume 49, Issue 1&2

 

Marilyn Hacker is the author of eleven books of poems, most recently Essays on Departure: New and Selected Poems (Carcanet Press, UK, 2006) and Desesperanto (Norton, 2003). Recent translations include Guy Goffette’s Charlestown Blues (University of Chicago Press, 2007) and Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s Nettles (Graywolf, 2008). She lives in New York and Paris


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2008 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize

- By Mass Review

The 2008 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize is Ralph Black for 21st Century Lecture

Volume 48, Issue 3

Ralph Black's poems have appeared in the Carolina Quarterly and the Georgia and Gettysburg Reviews, among other journals. His first book, Turning Over the Earth, was published by Milkweed Editions. He teaches at SUNY Brockport, where he is Co-director of the Brockport Writers Forum.


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2007 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize

- By Mass Review

The 2007 winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize is Bob Hicok for “First Do No Harm.”
 
Volume 46, Issue .
 
Bob Hicok’s first book of poetry, The Legend of Light (University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), received the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and was named a 1997 ALA Booklist Notable Book of the Year. His other poetry collections include Animal Soul (Invisible Cities Press, 2001), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; This Clumsy Living (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), winner of the 2008 Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress; and Sex & Love & (Copper Canyon Press, 2016).
 

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2006 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize

- By Mass Review

The 2006 winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize is Brian Swann for “Birds in the Woods.” 
 
Volume 46, Issue 4.
 
Brian Swann  is the author of several poetry collections, including St. Francis and the Flies (Autumn House Press, 2016), winner of the 2015 Autumn House Poetry Prize; Snow House (Pleiades Press, 2006), winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Series Award; and Autumn Road (Ohio State University Press, 2005), winner of the OSU/The Journal Poetry Prize. He is also the author of several works of prose, including Dogs on the Roof (MadHat Press, 2016), and has edited several essay and poetry collections celebrating Native American literature. Swann teaches at...

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2005 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize

- By Mass Review

The 2005 winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize is Diane Wald for “the corgis of queen elizabeth.”
 
Volume 45, Issue 2
 
Diane Wald has published four chapbooks (faustinetta, gegenschein, trapunto from Cervena Barva Press, Target of Roses from Grande Ronde Press, My Hat That Was Dreaming from White Fields Press, and Double Mirror from Runaway Spoon Press) and won the Green Lake Chapbook Award from Owl Creek Press. An electronic chapbook (Improvisations on Titles of Works by Jean Dubuffet) appears on the Mudlark website. Her book Lucid Suitcase was published by Red Hen Press in 1999 and her book, The Yellow Hotel, was published by...

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