Mark Halliday (born 1949 in Ann Arbor, Michigan) is a noted American poet, professor and critic. He is author of six collections of poetry, most recently "Thresherphobe" (University of Chicago Press, 2013) and Keep This Forever (Tupelo Press, 2008). His honors include serving as the 1994 poet in residence at The Frost Place, inclusion in several annual editions of The Best American Poetry series and of the Pushcart Prize anthology, receiving a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship, and winning the 2001 Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Halliday earned his B.A. (1971) and M.A. (1976) from Brown University, and his Ph.D. in English literature from Brandeis University in 1983, where he studied with poets Allen Grossman and Frank Bidart. He has taught English literature and writing at Wellesley College, the University of Pennsylvania, Western Michigan University, Indiana University. Since 1996, he has taught at Ohio University, where, in 2012, he was awarded the rank of distinguished professor. He is married to J. Allyn Rosser.
In the huddle you said "Go long—get open"
and at the snap I took off along the right sideline
and then cut across left in a long arc
and I'm sure I was open at several points—
...
They got old, they got old and died. But first—
okay but first they composed plangent depictions
of how much they lost and how much cared about losing.
...
It would have been dark but not lugubrious. It would have been
fairly short but not slight. It would have contained a child
saying something inadvertently funny that was not said by my daughter,
...
The students eat something and then watch the news,
a little, then go to sleep. When morning breaks in
they find they have not forgotten all: they recall
the speckle of words on certain pages of
...
I remember riding somewhere in a fast car
with my brother and his friend Jack Brooks
and we were listening to Layla & Other Love Songs
...