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 . . .
Not just one death,one victim tells another:they killed me by the roadside. —from Ibrahim Fawzy’s translation of Maya Abu Al-Hayyat’s “Not Just One Death” (Volume 65, issue 4) What role does language play in resisting colonialism and precipitating liberation? How does your piece engage with this question?Language is not merely a medium . . .
When the first ceasefire of the year was first announced, on January 19th, 2025, at around 10:00 a.m., celebrations broke out all over Gaza. For those who had remained steadfast in the north, the truce meant the killing had finally stopped, and those who had been displaced to the south were celebrating . . .
A Review of J. Malcolm Garcia’s Alabama Village: Faith, Hope, and Survival in a Southern Town (Seven Stories, 2025) From the get-go, let it be clear: this will be a partisan review. Early on, during the four-year-plus project that became Alabama Village, Malcolm mentioned to me in an email what he was . . .
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.
