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.

Legacy

When he was first offered the job he gulped. “I had no real understanding of its importance. Small magazines have always been at the cutting edge — the Harlem Renaissance, modernism — I knew that in general.”

Then he dove into 50 years of back issues. “I just kept reading more and more and finding more and more. Oh my god! I taught that essay for years and had no idea it was first published in this magazine! Lucille Clifton’s first poems were published in the MR. People don’t know that,” said Hicks.

“MR was the only literary magazine that completed the Civil Rights trifecta,” said Hicks, “They published RFK, JFK and MLK. My job here has always been don’t screw it up.”

“I was anointed or conned, I’m not sure which,” he laughs. “I never did anything like it before.”

But his lifelong behind-the-scenes background in theater, particularly in the area of lighting, served him well.

“Lighting design is a helluva lot like editing,” said Hicks. “You’re surrounded by passionate people. You take work that’s already there and you make it cleaner, clearer, you focus people’s attention where you want them to look.”

Hicks had two goals in mind: expanding the political energy at the mag and, “in the wake of the Bush years, de-provincializing and internationalizing as much as we could.”

In Hicks’ first issue as editor in 2010 he vowed to “dramatically increase the amount we publish in translation” and, quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson: “A journal that would meet the real wants of this time must have a courage and power sufficient to solve the problems which the great groping society around us, stupid with perplexity, is dumbly exploring.”

“We now have two translation editors, one for prose and one for poetry,” said Hicks.

Enough of that

He was born in Grand Rapids, spent his formative years in Lansing. His dad was director of youth services for the state but got fed up with bureaucracy. “Both my parents became social workers, which should tell you enough about their politics.”

Hicks becomes emotional as he recalls the assassination of Bobby Kennedy at the exact moment his presidential campaign caught fire. “I took a hammer and broke all my toy guns,” he said, choking up at the sudden loss of innocence.

“The violence … it was the third major assassination of my childhood. Enough of that. We had a moment of general insanity … and you have to think about how much of that has come back.”

Hicks got a PhD in comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He met his wife Anna Botta, a native of Italy, as an undergrad in Michigan. The couple spends a lot of time in Italy. In fact, when he spilled the news about his retirement on WHMP’s Talk the Talk, he was calling from a villa overlooking the Mediterranean.

Said the show’s co-host, Bill Newman, of Hicks: “The Massachusetts Review reflects his extraordinary ability to make erudition feel easy, interesting and accessible.”

Hicks and Botta both teach comparative lit. She retired from Smith College last year; he retires from UMass at the end of the year.

“I want to meet my grandfather, who died eight years before I was born,” said Hicks. “In the big flood of ’27 they lost their farm in Tennessee and moved to Michigan and got jobs. He was a union organizer.”

“But I’m mostly interested in the family’s first 20 years in Tennessee. Klan activity all around them, profiteers swarming in, draining the lake and putting in cotton fields.”

“If the only people who are trying to change our ideas of the history of this country are people whose ancestors were victims of its worst excesses — we need those stories, of the enslaved, of Native Americans — but it doesn’t really move until you get old white guys to think about how they were involved in this (expletive) too.”

His grandfather’s union activity started when he fell off scaffolding, broke both ankles, and realized he had no health care.

After that, Hicks wants to write about interpreters. “I’ve spent the last 25 years going back and forth to the former Yugoslavia, especially Bosnia — I taught there as a Fulbrighter — and I talked to interpreters and translators. These people know a helluva lot, the only ones who serve in both worlds.”

He holds up a book, “My Home Somewhere Else,” a Croatian translation of a novel that he translated from Italian. “This is a great way to learn Croatian because I know every sentence in this book. The secret of translation is when you finish it you feel like you wrote it,” he laughs.

Roots

The late Jules Chametzky, co-founder and driving force of the Massachusetts Review, mentored Hicks some in the last two years of his life. “He was the last major figure from that generation. Nobody was going to publish Black artists and Black Power writers in the early 1960s,” said Hicks. “He asked for their work and they sent it.”

“When the UMass English chair wanted to appoint the next MR editor in the early 1970s, they said, ‘OK, I think we need to become an independent non-profit.’ They always had real editorial independence.”

“I’d go over his house. ‘Jules, you won’t believe what happened this week,’ and he’d smile and say ‘I could tell you four stories about the same thing.’”

When he first took the job as editor Hicks got an email from a dean: “‘Jim, can you tell me a little bit about the magazine because I have to talk to the provost about it at the Five College Dean’s meeting.’ And I thought … they’re coming for us!”

So he put together a report and touted the mag’s undeniable bang for the buck, with its slew of stories, essays, poetry and art for $12, not to mention the educational aspect of hearing Third World stories first-hand.

“Funds weren’t cut, in fact the Five Colleges agreed to fund a full-time managing editor position, enabling the Review to qualify for grants.”

MR won the Whiting Literary Magazine Prize in 2021, a three-year grant. “MR promotes social justice and equality along with great art,” went the citation. “This rigorously edited magazine publishes lucid, risk-taking writing with flair and exquisite judgement, featuring work by emerging writers and Nobel laureates…”

“All literary magazines have institutions or angels behind them — it’s how we stay afloat,” said Hicks.

“But UMass may not be happy with our next issue, ‘A View from Gaza’ with guest editor Michel Moushabeck, a Palestinian. It’s gonna be fantastic, almost entirely Palestinian writers. Those voices need to be heard.”

“We try to have as wide and diverse a collective on the editorial board as possible. You’ve got these committed, brilliant, passionate people and they all will have insights that you don’t.”

Art has always been central to the mission, artists championed by art director Pamela Glaven, such as Ben Sakoguchi and his powerful 2021 pictorial of Japanese Americans forcibly relocated to guarded camps at the outbreak of World War II, with the army general in charge decreeing “A Jap’s a Jap. I don’t want any of them.”

Immune system

Though they put out one special issue every year, Hicks and his staff did not set out to publish one right after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, but the subsequent “Truth” issue had a mind of its own.

“This is the work that was coming to us,” said Hicks. “It was one of those times where you can respond really directly to something that seems really important.”

Of the Republican obsession with securing borders: “Racism works in the same way as words work. It’s really easy to put together a fervent passionate collective based on scapegoating someone else. With this Project 25, they’re organized and they won’t be fooling around.”

Though wary of all that and the possible Trump sequel, Hicks still keeps his will intact. The writer he’s translated most, Italy’s Erri De Luca, wrote, after Trump was elected in 2016, that “the United States has sort of an immune system that can fight off almost anything.”

“Consolidate your power!” says Jim Hicks. “We are inoculated!”

Hicks will be passing the torch to Britt Rusert, 42, of the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at UMass. The Tonawanda, New York, native pledges to honor and maintain the mag’s legacy. “The international tradition of MR stretches back to its founding, and Jim Hicks will leave us having deepened the magazine’s commitment to publishing literature in translation.”

In 2023 the magazine paid homage to that legacy. “Fifty years after they published one of the most important issues they ever published, ‘Woman: An Issue’—they had everyone from Bella Abzug, Angela Davis, Anais Nin to Lucille Clifton, Lisa Baskin was one of the guest editors — we wanted to do a tribute to that work,” said Hicks.

In ‘Woman: Revisited’ guest editors wrote: “We center women who have been most invisibilized — queer, trans, gender non-conforming, poor, incarcerated, disabled and more.”

“We’re stuck between a rock and a birthstool,” wrote Pamela Wax in the poem “Mississippi Goddam,” “Crowning long before the midwife can arrive with silphium to end it.”

“It’s a good job,” said Hicks. “You’re helping people who deserve to be helped. It’s about getting new things into the world.”

“But we need to be back on campus!” he insisted. “We need to be visible! We need to have students stopping by!”