Reading by Poet Diane Wald
Diane Wald, winner of the Massachusetts Review’s first annual Anne Halley Poetry Prize, will read from her work at Amherst Books on Thursday, April 21. That same afternoon, Diane Wald will also be a guest on MR2, Massachusetts Review Radio, at 5:30 p.m. on WMUA 91.1 FM.
The Anne Halley Poetry Prize is awarded to the best poem in the previous volume of the Massachusetts Review. This year’s judges were the Review’s poetry editors, Deborah Gorlin and Ellen Dore Watson, along with Professor Margo Culley of the University of Massachusetts English Department.
Diane Wald won for her poem “the corgis of queen elizabeth,” which was originally published in the Massachusetts Review’s Summer 2004 issue. Wald is the author of three chapbooks and two books, Lucid Suitcase (Red Hen Press, 1999) and The Yellow Hotel (Verse Press, 2002). She is a resident of Boston and works at the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Ellen Watson, co-editor of the Massachusetts Review, says “Wald’s poems are at once masterfully askew and startlingly centered. I greatly admire the seriousness of their whimsy.”
Copies of Diane Wald’s and Anne Halley’s books and issues of the Massachusetts Review will be available at the reading.
The Anne Halley Poetry Prize is named in memorial for Anne Halley, to honor her 25 years of work as poetry co-editor of the Massachusetts Review as well as her work as a poet and writer. Her most recent collection of poetry, Rumors of the Turning Wheel, was published by University of Massachusetts Press in 2003.
Review editor David Lenson says, “Anne Halley helped curate a rich assortment of poetic voices for the Review. Her special regard for work by women, minority, and international writers established an historic literary legacy for the Review.”
Published since 1959, The Massachusetts Review is an independent literary quarterly based at UMass Amherst. From Robert Frost’s work in its first issue to Billy Collins’s poem in its current issue, the Review has maintained a steady commitment to publishing outstanding work by established and emerging poets.
This event is sponsored by the Massachusetts Review, the UMass Amhersts English Department, and friends and family of Anne Halley.