Mark Halliday

Poet Mark Halliday earned a BA and an MA from Brown University, and a PhD from Brandeis University. Halliday has published several collections of poetry, including Losers Dream On (2018);  Keep This Forever (2008); Jab (2002); Tasker Street (1992), winner of the Juniper Prize; and Little Star (1987), selected for the National Poetry Series.

Influenced by New York School poets Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara, Halliday writes disarmingly accessible and humorous poems that use conversational markers to lead the reader on nuanced metaphysical, postmodern, and personal explorations. Using a term Halliday coined, critic David Graham describes Halliday’s work as “ultra-talk.” The New Yorker has also praised Halliday’s poetry, noting, “He is prolix and quotidian, a Whitman in a supermarket, a confessional poet who does not take himself very seriously.”

Halliday’s prose includes a study of Wallace Stevens, Stevens and the Interpersonal (1991), and a book on poetics, The Sighted Singer (1992), co-authored with Allen Grossman.

Halliday has won the Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Lila Wallace/Reader’s Digest Foundation Writer’s Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has taught at Indiana University, Western Michigan University, and Ohio University.