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 . . .
Katharina Volckmer’s second novel, Calls May Be Recorded (Two Dollar Radio, 9/16/25) is a fierce workplace satire that is bold in its exacting focus on those pushed to the margins of this century’s rapidly shifting labor market. It follows the protagonist Jimmie on a tragicomic gambol through a single day at a . . .
I have touched those cold seedswaiting to sprout, to reach toward whatis sun. North & South did taste different. But I don’t trust my memory. —from Elizabeth Bradfield’s “#73” (Volume 66 Issue 3) What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?Everything I read influences me, but some of my . . .
HE IS A MAN of stories, and of music. He would scoff to hear me say he has an artistic bent; his verdict on himself is that he lacks imagination. In other matters, too, he has the habit of self-effacement. And yet he’s bold, on the verge of overbearing, when marshaling evidence. He . . .
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.
