'Fearless Literary Leader': Massachusetts Review Executive Editor Jim Hicks Reflects on Profound 15 Years
Content
This story originally appeared in the Daily Hampshire Gazette.
Outgoing executive editor Jim Hicks of the Massachusetts Review has yet to warm up to his new surroundings.
400 Venture Way looks like one of those ultra-tech monoliths that have “Solutions” as part of its name. Surrounded by a sea of blacktop and manicured grass, it seems an unlikely place to produce an iconic literary mag like the MR, which, until last year, was put out quarterly from a tiny aging structure tucked away in a corner of the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus.
But water kept creeping in during storms. “We probably shouldn’t have mentioned that black mold was a health hazard,” chuckled Hicks. Now isolated from the campus and its people, Hicks has been decorating, just to give the place the feel of the rich history still being made.
Famously launched in 1959 by a group of young professors from surrounding colleges who got backing from their respective institutions, while demanding editorial independence, the mission still abides.
On the walls there are enlarged framed representations of MR’s earliest covers, featuring James Baldwin, Grace Paley and Amherst poet Robert Frost, who appears on the magazine’s very first cover in 1959, and who also contributed a poem to the pages within.
Hicks, 65, born at nearly the same time that issue hit the stands, is stepping down after 15 years.