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Jan. 22, 2010

UT Associate Dean Receives Award for Poem

The Massachusetts Review

“Enemy Infant,” a poem by Donald Morrill, UT associate dean of Graduate and Continuing Studies and Dana Professor of English, has been awarded the 2010 Anne Halley Prize from The Massachusetts Review. The annual award, which includes a cash prize of $500, recognizes the best work to appear in the magazine in the previous year. In addition, a broadside of the poem will be produced, and Morrill will give a reading of this and other works at UMass-Amherst this spring.

The poem addresses a madness of war, Morrill says, where warrior groups consider small children enemies, as much as they do adult soldiers in the opposition, because they too could grow up to be soldiers.

“Under the bane of such ‘logic,’ even an infant is fit for destroying,” Morrill says. “And the madness spreads out, across lives and tribes and memory ... and the murdered infant does grow up and return...”

To read the poem, visit www.massreview.org/PDF/5003/Morrill.pdf.