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 . . .
“Brianna80.” I like the round number, eighty. 4s, 8s, multiples of 10, a number I would have written as a child on and on, practicing my numbers: 8 then 0 then 8 then 0, looping like kids holding hands in a playground. The number eighty, attached to the temporary name Bri-anna, was . . .
The sun has coppered his brownas it has the mud on which we walk.Palms banana trees grow against the whitewall we barely see. Blue finches singin the wire cage he carries. Its greenperch is the same green as his trunks. —from Myronn Hardy’s “The Cage” (Volume 66, issue 3) Tell us about . . .
This piece is excerpted from Media, Culture, and Decolonization: Re-righting the Subaltern Histories of Ghana, to be published on 9th December 2025 by Rutgers University Press. Even though Ghana Television (GTV) began transmission in 1965, it wasn’t until 1985 that Ghanaians had access to color television. And it was not until 1989 . . .
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.
