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. The Massachusetts Review, a literary magazine, promotes social justice and equality, along with great art. Committed to aesthetic excellence as well as public engagement, MR publishes literature and art that provokes debate, inspires action, and expands our understanding of the world around us.
Author
Angela Yvonne Davis is an American political activist, scholar, and author. She emerged as a nationally prominent activist and radical in the 1960s, as a leader of the Communist Party USA, and had close relations with the Black Panther Party through her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement despite never being an official member of the party. Prisoner rights have been among her continuing interests; she is the founder of Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison-industrial complex. She is a retired professor with the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and is the former director of the university's Feminist Studies department. Her research interests are in feminism, African American studies, critical theory, Marxism, popular music, social consciousness, and the philosophy and history of punishment and prisons. Her membership in the Communist Party led to Ronald Reagan's request in 1969 to have her barred from teaching at any university in the State of California. She was tried and acquitted of suspected involvement in the Soledad brothers' August 1970 abduction and murder of Judge Harold Haley in Marin County, California. She was twice a candidate for Vice President on the Communist Party USA ticket during the 1980s.
