Discipline | Literary journal |
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Language | English |
Edited by | Jim Hicks, Michael Thurston, Ellen Doré Watson, Pam Glaven |
Publication details | |
Publisher |
Massachusetts Review, Inc., with support from Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst (United States)
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Publication history
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1959-present |
Frequency | Quarterly |
Indexing | |
ISSN |
0025-4878 |
JSTOR | 00254878 |
Links | |
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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.
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 (edited by John Emil Vincent, and featuring new work from Frank Bidart, Michael Moon, and Jack Spicer, as well as an interview with Judith Butler and a conversation between Michael Snediker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) as well as the 2011 Casualty Issue (co-edited by Kevin Bowen and Jim Hicks, with work from John Berger, Erri De Luca, Juan Goytisolo, Yusef Komunyakaa, David Rabe, and Nora Strejilevich).