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Sarah Sousa Named the 2015 Anne Halley Poetry Prize Winner

Congratulations to SARAH SOUSA,
winner of the
2015 ANNE HALLEY POETRY PRIZE
awarded by the Massachusetts Review

–Poetry Reading by Sarah Sousa
Monday, March 30, 2015
7:00 p.m. at Amherst Books

Sarah Sousa is the 2015 Anne Halley Poetry Prize winner, for "Her Moods Caused Owls," published in the Fall 2014 issue of MR. Sousa’s first collection, Church of Needles, won the 2013 Red Mountain Prize and was published by Red Mountain Press in 2014. Her second collection, Split the Crow, was published January 2015 by Free Verse Editions, an imprint of Parlor Press. She is the editor and transcriber of The Diary of Esther Small, 1886 (Small Batch Books), which won the New England Book Festival award for Regional Literature.

Sousa holds an MFA in poetry and literature from Bennington College. Her poetry has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Fugue, Passages North, Barn Owl Review, and Salt Hill Journal, among others. She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize and is the recipient of a Dorothy Sergent Rosenberg Award. Her poem, “Learning My Name,” is featured at the Poetry in the Park installation project at Edmand’s Park in Newton, MA. She currently writes and teaches poetry in western Massachusetts.

“Something magical happens in these pages—we are waked from forgetfulness and are pulled into a living history that revives us and spares us nothing. The reader demands: ‘we want /what is real, don't deny us’ and Sousa does not disappoint. In exploring the narrative of Mary Rowlandson, Split the Crow employs lyric to stop time, draw it close, and inspect it on its own terms without being either pedantic or patronizing. Sousa bares essential truths of our young country; we have struggled all along defining ourselves by othering. In spite of this, Split the Crow shows all that is human is transitive. I had been dying to read this book until I read it; I did not know what I lacked until I was sated." —T.J. Jarrett


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