Blog / Interviews

2022 Anne Halley Poetry Prize Reading

May 26, 2022 - By Robert Whitehead

Emerita MR Poetry editors Ellen Doré Watson and Deb Gorlin selected Robert Whitehead's "David" from Spring 2021 (Vol. 62, Issue 1), for our annual Anne Halley Prize for Poetry.

From the judge's note: "By retelling the story of the fabled hero, the breathless narrator of Whitehead’s inspirational, of-the-moment poem, exhorts us to be like David, to marshal our own naked energies and hard-won hopes, our own ‘all-he-had-to-fight,’ to win an improbable victory over the Goliath-like perils...

10 Questions for Kemi Alabi

May 26, 2022 - By Edward Clifford

O taxi glass, O broken fall, be soprano, be alto.
Give me sea sharp, give doh doh doh, give mi fa so?
O gravity, slip soft. Lay with this sorry child
              before they soulsplint & ugly up this here garden.
—from "The Lion Tamer's Daughter vs. The Ledge," Volume 63, Issue 1 (Spring 2022)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I recently found a poem I wrote in first grade. It was about the moon.

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
When I was 18, I heard Patricia Smith read at the Cantab Lounge in Cambridge, and I’ve never been the same. Her way with...

10 Questions for Katherine Kolupke

May 17, 2022 - By Edward Clifford

After Sophie's love affairs had all gone sour, her life became a drought. Once full of lust and beauty, Sophie was now faded and dried, like a stalk of corn left too long in the sun. She drifted through the days at the tiny Denver packing and mailing shop where she workd, next to Sloan's Lake. The customers seemed to withhold from her, somehow knowing that she was vacant, lacking; it made them shrink back.
—from "Poison," Volume 63, Issue 1 (Spring 2022)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I wrote a couple of partial novels that I abandoned after thirty pages or so. They were enthusiastic attempts at the glossy “Chick Lit” genre that was popular in the early 2000’s. It was really hard to...

10 Questions for Travis Price

May 10, 2022 - By Edward Clifford

I didn't know many people who had gone to university. Neither Dad, nor Mom, nor my grandparents went. Still I knew more or less how university types dressed and even how they spoke, partly because my cousin was a veterinary student (though I barely saw him, and until he finally graduated, I wasn't entirely sure that he'd actually been studying for thirteen whole years like he claimed.)
—from "This Is a Pipe," Volume 63, Issue 1 (Spring 2022)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
When I lived in Uruguay in 2018, I discovered a good way of making friends: Inviting Uruguayans I wanted to get to know better to play a game of Settlers of Catan. One of my competitors turned out to be the writer Marcelo...

10 Questions for Sakena Abedin

May 3, 2022 - By Edward Clifford

They came to meet him at the tiny airport in the town where he had attended medical college. As he went from his new house in Texas to the airport to New York and then London and Delhi, he had the sensation that the world was growing bigger and bigger. But on the final leg of his journey, the flight from Delhi to Nagpur, it all shrank back down again.
—from "Kabir," Volume 63, Issue 1 (Spring 2022)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
When I was in fourth grade, I borrowed the family typewriter and wrote a story set in my neighborhood with a plot that was heavily borrowed from Heidi, which was my favorite book at the time. Many years passed before I tried my hand at fiction again.

What writer(s...