Anne Halley (1928–2004)

Anne Halley was born Ute Marianne Elisabeth Halle in Bremerhaven, Germany to parents who were both doctors. She had a twin sister, Renate. In 1936, her father Maxwell Halle, who was Jewish and banned by the Nazis from the medical profession, escaped to the USA with her older brother. Her mother Margarethe Kohlhepp Halle followed them a year later, leaving the twins temporarily with an aunt. The family was reunited in New York in 1938 and settled in Orlean. Now known as Anne Halley, she graduated from Wellesley College in 1949 and earned a master's degree in English from the University of Minnesota in 1951. There she also met her future husband, writer Jules Chametzky. In 1953, the couple married and later had three sons. They moved to Amherst, Massachusetts when Chametzky was offered a teaching position at the University of Massachusetts.

Anne began her career as a teacher and writer while at UMinnesota. She then taught at both UMass and Smith College as a part-time instructor and visiting lecturer and at Holyoke Community College as an assistant professor. In addition, she taught intermittently at Frankfurt University and the Free University of Berlin. She became a noted poet and feminist, publishing three collections of her work: Between Wars & Other Poems (1965); The Bearded Mother (1979); and
Rumors of the Turning Wheel (2003). She received numerous awards for her poetry and short stories, including the Longview Foundation Award for Distinguished Writing (1961), the O. Henry Prize (1976), and the Massachusetts Artist Foundation Fellowship for poetry (1980), as well as a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in 1982.
She also translated Deutschland üeber Alles by German satirist Kurt Tucholsky. From 1977 to 2002, she served as the poetry editor of The Massachusetts Review. The Anne Halley Poetry Prize, co-sponsored by the Massachusetts Review and the English Department at UMass Amherst, is named in her honor.