A key early focus was on civil rights as well as African-American history and culture; the Review published, among many others, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling A.

In 1969, co-editor Jules Chametzky and Kaplan put together a collection of essays from the first ten years of MR; Julius Lester, in the New York Times, called Black and White in American Culture "a rare anthology [...] with a higher degree of relevance than almost any other book of its kind.

[citation needed] Recent special issues include the 2008 Especially Queer Issue (edited by John Emil Vincent, and featuring new work from Frank Bidart, Michael Moon, and Jack Spicer, as well as an interview with Judith Butler and a conversation between Michael Snediker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick)[citation needed] as well as the 2011 Casualty Issue (co-edited by Kevin Bowen and Jim Hicks, with work from John Berger, Erri De Luca, Juan Goytisolo, Yusef Komunyakaa, David Rabe, and Nora Strejilevich).

Recent artists featured in magazine inserts include Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Whitfield Lovell, Anna Schuleit, and Dan Witz.

Influential individual works from its pages include contributions from Chinua Achebe’s “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness", Robert Frost, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Legacy of Creative Protest", Roberto Fernández Retamar’s “Caliban", Adrienne Rich’s “Blood, Bread, and Poetry", and Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Black Orpheus".