The Massachusetts Review - History

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, W.E.B. Du Bois, Lucille Clifton, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gwendolyn Brooks, and Sterling A. Brown. 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, Anaïs Nin, Tina Modotti, Angela Davis, Sonia Sanchez, Audre Lorde, and Norman Mailer. Recent special issues include the 2008 Especially Queer Issue (edited by John Emil Vincent, and featuring new work from Frank Bidart, Michael Moon, 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 Juan Goytisolo, John Berger, Yusef Komunyakaa, David Rabe, Nora Strejilevich, and Erri De Luca).