The Massachusetts Review

Discipline	Literary journal
Language	English
Edited by	Jim Hicks, Michael Thurston, Ellen Doré Watson, Pam Glaven
Publication details
History	1959–present
Publisher	Massachusetts Review, Inc., with support fromAmherst,Hampshire,Mount Holyoke, andSmith Colleges, and theUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst (United States)
Frequency	Quarterly
Standard abbreviations ISO 4 (alt) · Bluebook (alt) NLM (alt) · MathSciNet (alt)
ISO 4	Mass. Rev.
Indexing CODEN (alt · alt2) · JSTOR (alt) · LCCN (alt) MIAR · NLM (alt) · Scopus · W&L
ISSN	0025-4878
JSTOR	00254878
Links
Journal homepage

The Massachusetts Review is a literary quarterly founded in 1959^[1] by a group of professors fromAmherst College,Mount Holyoke College,Smith College, and theUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst.^[2] It receives financial support fromFive Colleges, Inc., a consortium which includesAmherst College and four other educational institutions in a short geographical radius.

MR bills itself as "A Quarterly of Literature, the Arts, and Public Affairs." A key early focus was oncivil rights as well asAfrican-American history and culture; theReview published, among many others,Gwendolyn Brooks,Sterling A. Brown,Lucille Clifton,W.E.B. Du Bois, andMartin Luther King Jr.^[3] Sidney Kaplan, a founder of the Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, was a founding member ofMR as well; Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, also a founder of Afro-American Studies at UMass, continues to serve as a contributing editor. In 1969, co-editorJules Chametzky and Kaplan put together a collection of essays from the first ten years ofMR;Julius Lester, in theNew York Times, calledBlack and White in American Culture "a rare anthology [...] with a higher degree of relevance than almost any other book of its kind."^[4]

In 1972,MR published a double issue, entitledWoman: An Issue, edited by Lisa Baskin, Lee Edwards, and Mel Heath, featuring work fromBella Abzug,Angela Davis,Audre Lorde,Norman Mailer,Anaïs Nin,Tina Modotti, andSonia Sanchez.^{[citation needed]} Recent special issues include the 2008Especially Queer Issue (edited by John Emil Vincent, and featuring new work fromFrank Bidart,Michael Moon, andJack Spicer, as well as an interview withJudith Butler and a conversation betweenMichael Snediker andEve Kosofsky Sedgwick)^{[citation needed]} as well as the 2011Casualty Issue (co-edited by Kevin Bowen and Jim Hicks, with work fromJohn Berger,Erri De Luca,Juan Goytisolo,Yusef Komunyakaa,David Rabe, and Nora Strejilevich).^{[citation needed]}

MR is known for visual as well as literary arts.^[5] Its cover design was initially conceived by the sculptor and graphic artistLeonard Baskin, who contributed work throughout his career.Jerome Liebling – the photographer, filmmaker, and mentor toKen Burns – was also anMR editor. Recent artists featured in magazine inserts includeManuel Álvarez Bravo,Whitfield Lovell,Anna Schuleit, andDan Witz.

TheMassachusetts Review has published 10Nobel Prize winners, 23 Pulitzer Prize winners, and 9United States Poets Laureate. Influential individual works from its pages include contributions fromChinua Achebe’s “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness",Robert Frost,Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Legacy of Creative Protest",Roberto Fernández Retamar’s “Caliban",Adrienne Rich’s “Blood, Bread, and Poetry", andJean-Paul Sartre’s “Black Orpheus".

TheCommunity of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP, formerly CCLM) website notes: "[In 1967, t]he Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines (CCLM) [was] founded by a board of magazine editors at the suggestion of theNational Endowment for the Arts (NEA), to act as an NEA regranter. The signatories of the original letter of intent to the NEA [were]Reed Whittemore (The Carleton Miscellany,New Republic);Jules Chametzky (The Massachusetts Review);George Plimpton (TheParis Review);Robie Macauley (TheKenyon Review); andWilliam Phillips (The Partisan Review).^[6]

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.^{[citation needed]}

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;Carl Hancock Rux, multidisciplinary editor; Emily Wojcik, managing editor;Edwin Gentzler, translation editor;Corinne Demas, fiction editor; and Deborah Gorlin, poetry editor.

• List of literary magazines

• Massachusetts Review

• Literary magazines published in the United States
• Quarterly magazines published in the United States
• Amherst College
• Magazines established in 1959
• Magazines published in Massachusetts
• Mount Holyoke College
• Smith College
• University of Massachusetts Amherst

• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Use mdy dates from March 2025
• Quarterly journals (infobox)
• All articles with unsourced statements
• Articles with unsourced statements from March 2014