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 . . .
Sometimes I think of my life as a big container with others stacked inside it, like one of those wooden Russian dolls they sell at Christmas. Chris—the smallest—insideNiagara Falls, insideMateo, insidemy film notebook, insidemy job at FALLOUT, the outer shell If only I could get down to the innermost container—the essential, most . . .
It’s been reported: in Bucha,people are collecting bodies stuffedwith bullets, hands tied behind their backs.—from M. Cynthia Cheung’s “The Amount of Death and Pain in the City Was Extraordinary,” Volume 66, Issue 1 (Spring 2025) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.Around the time I began writing poetry, I . . .
. . . THE PHOTOCOPIER.If called on to produce more than a dozen double-sided copies, it began to overheat, and on its worst days, Jeanie’s efforts ended in the abduction of one pristine sheet after another into the machine’s inscrutable bowels. There the paper was tightly accordioned, the copier’s companionable hum abruptly . . .
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.
