The Next Best Thing
December 10, 2025 - by Staff
Leila Chatti, Jan Clausen, Susan Li, Meghana Mysore, Amanda Sarasien and Elton Uliana, and Natalie Scenters-Zapico! We are beyond proud to have published these works this past year, and wish the best to our nominees in the future. Congratulations, and thank you all—your brilliant work makes our own that much brighter!! From . . .
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July 11, 2025 - by Amy Yee, with the Dalai Lama
Editor’s Note: The Dalai Lama celebrated his ninetieth birthday on July 6th and will observe the next twelve months as a “year of compassion.” The Massachusetts Review shares today an excerpt from contributor Amy Yee’s narrative nonfiction book, Far From the Rooftop of the World: Travels among Tibetan Refugees on Four Continents . . .
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July 1, 2025 - by Staff
Elise Paschen’s latest collection is Blood Wolf Moon, our from Red Hen. Her poem “Heritage” appeared in our A GATHERING OF NATIVE VOICES issue back in 2020. BOA Editions recently published Lonely Women Make Good Lovers, the latest collection from poet Keetje Kuipers, whose poem “I, Too, Took Pictures of My Body” . . .
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June 18, 2025 - by Lisa Huffaker
These erasures are created from pages of Fascinating Womanhood, a 1963 “self-improvement” manual for wives, with whose author I (once) shared a religious background. It urged women to suppress their intelligence and capability, and make themselves childlike, dependent, and “feminine.” I first encountered it in the library of the religious institute across the . . .
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June 17, 2025 - by Abigail Chabitnoy
Editor’s note: April 16, 2025, on the campus of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Abigail Chabitnoy– mentor for the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA in Creative Writing, poetry editor for the Massachusetts Review, and assistant professor of English at UMass Amherst—presented this year’s Oscar-nominated documentary, Sugarcane, directed by Julian Brave NoiseCat . . .
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May 9, 2025 - by Agostino Ferrente
Editor’s note: April 23, 2025, on the campus of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the celebrated Italian documentarian Agostino Ferrente presented his 2019 film Selfie, which first screened at the Berlin Film Festival, was nominated for Best Documentary at the European Film Awards, and subsequently won prizes at film festivals in Luxembourg . . .
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July 5, 2024 - By Darcy Buerkle
Editor’s note: Alon Confino, director of the IHGMS at UMass, died on June 27, after a long illness. Professor Buerkle offered the following remarks at his funeral on July 2. My name is Darcy Buerkle, I am a faculty member in the History department at Smith College and it is a great . . .
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June 13, 2024 - By Carl Hancock Rux
Key Art by Trevor Davis Presented here is Carl Hancock Rux’s Artist Statement for his forthcoming Juneteenth celebration at Lincoln Center “It was while singing… the idea of escaping from slavery was first suggested to my mind.” —Frederick Douglass African American music is inseparable from the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the forced . . .
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January 16, 2024 - by Staff
We published Kayhan Irani’s performance piece in the winter 2023 issue, WOMAN: Revisited. Titled “There Is a Portal,” you can find the full multimedia digital experience here.
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November 6, 2023 - By Darcy Day Zoells
Excerpt from The New Bicycle. Forthcoming from Clavis Publishing, 24 pp., November 2023. Recently Daniel Barenboim, the Israeli conductor, stated that, “Music is one way to bring people together—we are all equal human beings who deserve peace, freedom, and happiness.” Of course, we could say not only music, but all of the arts. Dialectically . . .
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