About

Mission: In these uncertain times, the Massachusetts Review promotes social justice and equality, along with great art. Committed to aesthetic excellence as well as public engagement, MR publishes literature and art to provoke debate, inspire action, and expand our understanding of the world around us.

Founded in 1959 by a group of professors from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst College, Mount Holyoke, and Smith, the Massachusetts Review is one of the nation’s leading literary magazines, distinctive in joining the highest level of artistic concern with pressing public issues. As The New York Times observed, “It is amazing that so much significant writing on race and culture appears in one magazine.”  MR was named one of the top ten literary journals in 2008 by the Boston Globe.

A 200-page quarterly of fiction, poetry, essays, and the visual arts by both emerging talents and established authors, including Pulitzer and Nobel prizewinners, special issues have covered women’s rights, civil rights, and Caribbean, Canadian, and Latin American literatures.

MR‘s history of significant criticism includes major work on W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Grace Paley. An Egypt issue, published just after 9/11, focused on the social, national, religious, and ethnic concerns of that nation, and 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). Our special double issue for Fall/Winter 2011 was entitled “Casualty” and documented—in art, prose and poetry—the enduring cost of war.


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The Massachusetts Review is edited by a highly talented and diverse group of writers and teachers, centered in the Five Colleges area of Western Massachusetts and throughout the country. Our offices are at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. For more information about the editors, please click their names.

To contact individual editors, write to the editorial office (NEW ADDRESS: Massachusetts Review, 400 Venture Way, Hadley, MA 01035) or email massrev@external.umass.edu.

Britt Rusert, Executive Editor

ART
Pam Glaven, Art Director
Mario Ontiveros, Art Editor

POETRY
Nathan McClain, Poetry Editor
Abigail Chabitnoy, Poetry Editor

PROSE
F. Orlandi, Prose Editor
Asha Nadkarni, Prose Editor
Jemimah James Wei, Prose Editor

PUBLIC AFFAIRS
Shailja Patel, Multigenre Editor

F. Orlandi, Prose Editor

TRANSLATION
Mona Kareem, Poetry-in-Translation Editor
Corine Tachtiris, Prose-in-Translation Editor
Jack Saebyok Jung, Translation Editor

PERFORMANCE
Dominic Taylor, Theater Editor

REVIEWS
Richie Wills, Reviews Editor

Michael Thurston, Poetry Reviews Editor

SUBMISSIONS READERS
Assemay Almazbekkyzy
Corinne Demas

Mike Dockins
Robert Dow
Vika Mujumdar
Paige Passantino
Nate Pinkham
Mary Luna Robledo
Ide Thompson

STAFF
Emily Wojcik, Business Manager

Edward Clifford, Managing Editor
Franchesca Viaud, Assistant Editor

G. Ziegel, Editorial Assistant

Jules Chametzky, Founding Editor

From the Blog

“Tatreez, Taught” التطريز , مُدرَّس

Reproduced with permission of Kenar Embroidery.      During the genocide of Gaza beginning in 2023, the destruction extended beyond lives, land, and buildings into art, culture, heritage and memory. One day, I saw a picture of a Tatreez piece lying above the rubble, it was a stitched map of Palestine. The red threads . . .

Reading by J. D. Mathes

J. D. Mathes from our Winter Special Issue, INCARCERATION & FAMILY, reads his essay “Momma Tried”: Video recorded and edited by Mathes. J. D. Mathes grew up a feral child in the deserts of the American Southwest who loved to read library books. He is a PEN America Writing for Justice Fellow, . . .

A WINTER’S TALE¹

Reviewing Joshua Colangelo-Bryan’s Through the Gates of Hell. American Injustice at Guantanamo Bay (Humanitas Media, 2025), 224 pp. I. Buddies When you pick up a book written by a lawyer for Guantanamo detainees, knowing that it will contain an account of his work representing those clients, the last thing you expect to . . .

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