PHILIP METRES AWARDED THE MASSACHUSETTS REVIEW’S 8th ANNUAL ANNE HALLEY POETRY PRIZE

The editors of the Massachusetts Review are proud to announce that the winner of this year’s Anne Halley Poetry Prize is Philip Metres for his poem “Home/Front,” published in the journal’s Casualty Issue.

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 Creative Writing, both in 2001. Since then, his writing has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry. He is the author of a number of books, including To See the Earth (Cleveland State 2008), Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941 (University of Iowa Press, 2007), Instants (a chapbook, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006), Primer for Non-Native Speakers (a chapbook, Kent State 2004), Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Selected Poems of Lev Rubinstein (Ugly Duckling 2004), and A Kindred Orphanhood: Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky (Zephyr 2003). He has received fellowships from Thomas J. Watson Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Ledig House, and the Ohio Arts Council. His writing has been translated into Polish, Russian, and Tamil. Currently, he is an associate professor of English at John Carroll University, where he teaches American Literature and Creative Writing. 

On Wednesday, March 28 at 7:30 PM Metres presented his work at the annual prize reading, which was hosted by University Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. A broadside of the winning poem and copies of the issue in which his poem appears are available.