On May 8th, MR and Amherst Books hosted our 2025 Anne Halley Poetry Prize winner Chard deNiord for a reading.
ONE FATHER in a khaki jumpsuit branded with “Correctional Facility” smiles as he supports his fourteen-year-old’s interest in saving the bees through the telephone. In a prison waiting room, another father liesgently to his six-year-old son that the boy’s mother is not incarcerated at all, but at a “police training academy,” where . . .
“The Sahara,” articulates Maysa Abou-Youssef Hayward in her study of the desert in Arabic verse, “represents a location marked by fear, loss, exile, and emptiness, the result of destruction.” In Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences (University of California Press, 2025) Brahim El Guabli argues that this idea . . .
David Lloyd (65.2) published his fourth poetry collection, The Last Season, with Tiger Bark Press at the end of last year. Jane Zwart (60.4; 64.2)’s debut poetry collection Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best from Orison Books came out in early February. Mitchell Jacobs (60.3; 65.2)’s debut poetry collection Rogue Astronaut . . .
Editor’s note: Carl “Taqwaa” Moore, author of “Thank You, Whoever You Are” from our Winter Special issue, is a writer who is currently incarcerated. The carceral communication systems make conducting a more formal interview nearly impossible. After several weeks of correspondence, we were able to achieve both written and phone interviews. Below . . .
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.
