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 . . .
OUR BARRIO SITS on the borders between Bukidnon province and Cagayan de Oro city, a half-forgotten hinterland. Cross the last sitio’s bridge, and you’ve left the city behind. Bukidnon’s roads are the end of asphalt dreams, where concrete gives way to earth: a bumpy quagmire in the season of rains, a dusty . . .
Paati lived at the edge of a minor fishing village, in a small gray house darkened by caliginous algae stains that streamed down its outer walls and along the edges of its clay roof tiles. She was their mother’s mother, a stern woman, darker than their mother, with a nose curved and . . .
some dusks I linger long enoughto watch bats stream from the eaves of my neighbor’s houselike blood starved ofoxygen I could cut my ownumbilical cord to the world to watch theindigo sky leak out and believe I was thesource. I’m sorry. I’m sorry —from Brian Russell’s “Missouri,” Vol 66, issue 3 (Fall . . .
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.
