About
Mark Halliday has a BA and an MA from Brown University, and a PhD in English Literature from Brandeis University. Since 1996, he has taught poetry at Ohio University, where he was named Distinguished Professor in 2012.
He has published seven books of poetry (Little Star, 1987; Tasker Street, 1992; Selfwolf, 1999; Jab, 2002; Keep This Forever, 2008; Thresherphobe, 2013; Losers Dream On, 2018), and two books of criticism (Stevens and the Interpersonal, 1991; Living Name, 2025). His poetry is known for its colloquial wit, ironic turns, and its search for profundity in the everyday.
On his latest essay collection Living Name
“For two decades now, I have considered Mark Halliday to be not merely a first-rate poet, but also perhaps the best writer about contemporary poetry that we have in this country. His prose is graceful, elegant, and inviting. His opinions, whether one agrees or not, are invariably invigorating and intelligent. He writes with the attention of someone who has made a lifetime’s study not just of the craft of poetry but of its sources, purposes, and value to us.”
Kevin Prufer
“Most of the pieces in Living Name are appreciations—not, commendably, unreserved ones—of some of Halliday’s favorite poets. Close reading abounds: penetrating, sensitive, often revelatory. Every essay in the book is graced with Halliday’s signature virtues: jargon-free eloquence, extreme sanity, humor, intelligence, self-awareness (often manifested in a willingness to qualify his own judgments), a generous sympathy for poetics (most notably Dean Young’s) that differ from his own, all underpinned by a conception and exaltation of poetry as an art in service to humanity.”
Daniel Brown
“For Halliday, poems are frequently engaged in preserving what is past or passing; so too, his criticism recalls these poets to us with renewed force and a deepened appreciation. In the end, it is Halliday’s ‘spirit of caring attentiveness’ (a quality he finds in Frank O’Hara) that restores these poets to our eyes and ears in all their lively, teeming, and enduring particulars. Acute, humane, and free of cant, this is first-rate criticism.”
David Yezzi
On his latest poetry collection Losers Dream On
“And you try to be awake,” growls Mark Halliday. These poems are fully awake, practicing vivisection on their own delusions, complacencies, and sublimities, carving into the tissue of language. Song here sounds more like invoice than voice. Yet its wit reveals the timeless: sorrow for a dying father, a lost wife, and the core recognition of our “dustitude.” A remarkable book.
Rosanna Warren
Reading Losers Dream On is like listening in on the constantly shifting, uncomfortable thoughts of a mind brilliantly attuned to the world of memory and to its own intricate (often hilarious) processes. These poems take place in landscapes that seem familiar at first—snow-covered parking lots, an empty Mexican restaurant, airport gates crowded with travelers—but, under Mark Halliday’s gaze, they become dazzling and strange, filled with troublesome knowledge and the possibility of mortality and transcendence. Witty, exciting, and wide-awake, Halliday is one of the best poets at work in America today.
Kevin Prufer
Mark Halliday is one of our foremost technicians of the American vernacular. In Halliday’s poems, James Joyce, Leave It To Beaver, and Sir Walter Raleigh all get their turn at the microphone. I admire Halliday’s dedication to coherence, self-interrogation, and endless verbal playfulness. His voice is one of the most reliable, hilarious, effervescent, and moody pleasures in the contemporary canon. His rich new collection, Losers Dream On, holds its own with the high standard of his best work.
Tony Hoagland