Founded in 1959 by a group of professors from Amherst, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and UMass Amherst, MR is one of the nation’s leading literary magazines, distinctive in joining highest-level artistic concerns with pressing public issues. “It is amazing that so much significant writing on race and culture appears in one magazine” (The New York Times).

A 200-page quarterly of fiction, poetry, essays, and the visual arts (its original template was designed by artist Leonard Baskin) by both emerging talents and Pulitzer and Nobel prizewinners, special issues have covered women’s rights, civil rights, and Caribbean, Canadian, and Latin American literatures.

MR also has a history of significant criticism of W.E.B. Dubois and Nathaniel Hawthorne. An Egypt issue, published just after 9/11 on social, national, religious, and ethnic concerns, encouraged readers to look beyond stereotypes of terrorism and racism. As part of the run-up to its Fiftieth birthday, MR published a landmark issue on queer studies at the beginning of 2008 (Volume 49 Issue 1&2). The Winter issue was a commemoration of Grace Paley, which is going to be followed by an anniversary issue, art exhibition, and poetry reading in April of 2009.