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Geffrey Davis Named the 10th Annual Anne Halley Prize Winner

Congratulations to GEFFREY DAVIS,
winner of the 10th Annual
ANNE HALLEY POETRY PRIZE
awarded by The Massachusetts Review!

Poetry Reading by Geffrey Davis
Tuesday, April 3, 2014
7:00pm at Amherst Books

 

Geffrey Davis’s debut collection, Revising the Storm, was selected by Dorianne Laux for the 2013 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, and will be published by BOA Editions in April 2014. Part of his work as a literary citizen involves promoting the poetry of others. To this end, he co-created and co-edits the online journal Toe Good Poetry.

Davis holds degrees from Oregon State University and Penn State University. His awards include the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, the Leonard Steinberg Memorial/Academy of American Poets Prize, nominations for the Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation and Penn State's Institute for the Arts and Humanities. His work has appeared in Crazyhorse, Hayden's Ferry Review, the Massachusetts ReviewNimrod, [PANK], and Sycamore Review, among others.

“‘In my previous life as a deer,’ begins one of the many terrific poems here, ‘I honed my brand / of nervousness, balanced instinct and memory.’ It is as if Robert Lowell’s Life Studies was remixed for the contemporary moment as Geffrey Davis translates and transforms our contemporary modes of love, violence and history. Revising the Storm feels written by a poet who has traversed several previous lives and honed them into a language of beautiful survival. Urgent, tender, imaginative: this is a tremendous debut.” —Terrance Hayes, author of Lighthead, winner of the 2012 National Book Award

 

About the Anne Halley Poetry Prize:

Anne Halley was Poetry Editor of the Massachusetts Review for twenty-five years, and had a long association with the English Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The author of three distinctive novels of verse and many prize-winning stories, she enjoyed a long career as a beloved teacher both in the U.S. and abroad. The Anne Halley Poetry Prize is awarded annually, and is co-sponsored by MR and the UMass English Department. The $500 award is given to an early- to mid-career poet for the best poem to appear in the preceding year of MR, as chosen by two editors and a member of the English Department. The prize-winning poet is invited to give a Spring reading in Amherst.


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