The Massachusetts Review


The Massachusetts Review is a literary quarterly founded in 1959 by a group of professors from Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. It receives financial support from Five Colleges, Inc., a consortium which includes Amherst College and four other educational institutions in a short geographical radius.

History

MR bills itself as "A Quarterly of Literature, the Arts, and Public Affairs." A key early focus was on civil rights as well as African-American history and culture; the Review published, among many others, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling A. Brown, Lucille Clifton, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King, Jr.. Sidney Kaplan, a founder of the Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, was a founding member of MR as well; Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, also a founder of Afro-American Studies at UMass, continues to serve as a Contributing Editor. In 1969, co-editor Jules Chametzky and Kaplan put together a collection of essays from the first ten years of MR; Julius Lester, in the New York Times, called Black and White in American Culture "a rare anthology with a higher degree of relevance than almost any other book of its kind."
In 1972, MR published a double issue, entitled Woman: An Issue, edited by Lisa Baskin, Lee Edwards, and Mel Heath, featuring work from Bella Abzug, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, Norman Mailer, Anaïs Nin, Tina Modotti, and Sonia Sanchez. Recent special issues include the 2008 Especially Queer Issue as well as the 2011 Casualty Issue.

Achievements

MR is known for visual as well as literary arts. Its cover design was initially conceived by the sculptor and graphic artist Leonard Baskin, who contributed work throughout his career. Jerome Liebling – the photographer, filmmaker, and mentor to Ken Burns – was also an MR editor. Recent artists featured in magazine inserts include Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Whitfield Lovell, Anna Schuleit, and Dan Witz.
The Massachusetts Review has published 10 Nobel Prize winners, 23 Pulitzer Prize winners, and 9 United States Poets Laureate. Influential individual works from its pages include contributions from Chinua Achebe’s “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness", Robert Frost, Martin Luther King’s “Legacy of Creative Protest", Roberto Fernández Retamar’s “Caliban", Adrienne Rich’s “Blood, Bread, and Poetry", and Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Black Orpheus".
The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses website notes: "he Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines founded by a board of magazine editors at the suggestion of the National Endowment for the Arts, to act as an NEA regranter. The signatories of the original letter of intent to the NEA Reed Whittemore ; Jules Chametzky ; George Plimpton ; Robie Macauley ; and William Phillips.

Prizes

The magazine awards the Anne Halley Poetry prize to the best poem it published yearly; it also awards the Jules Chametzky Prize for Translation each year, alternating between its prose and poetry translations.

Masthead

The current staff includes: Jules Chametzky, Editor Emeritus; Jim Hicks, Executive Editor; Ellen Doré Watson, Poetry and Translation Editor; Michael Thurston, Fiction and Nonfiction Editor; Pam Glaven, Art Director; Emily Wojcik, Managing Editor; Edwin Gentzler, Translation Editor; Corinne Demas, Fiction Editor; and Deborah Gorlin, Poetry Editor.