[1] The quarterly (known as "MQR" for short) publishes art, essays, interviews, memoirs, fiction, poetry, and book reviews as well as writing "in a wide variety of research areas", according to its Web site.

In recent years the magazine has published nonfiction by Margaret Atwood, Carol Gilligan, David M. Halperin, Douglas Hofstadter, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Amos Oz, Richard Rorty, John Updike, William Julius Wilson and Dimitris Lyacos and fiction by Sergio Troncoso, Elizabeth Gaffney, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Alice Mattison, Garth Greenwell, Peter Mountford, Kalisha Buckhanon, Eileen Pollack, Peter Orner, Douglas Trevor, Steve Amick, Corinne Demas, Lauren Belfer, and Jacob Appel.

The Best American Poetry series frequently reprints poems that originally appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review.

[3] Past winners include Charles Baxter, Paul Bowles, Susan Dodd, Clark Blaise, Sena Jeter Naslund, Rebecca Makkai, Alice Mattison, and Lynne Sharon Schwartz.

The prize is sponsored by University of Michigan alumnus and writer Leonard S. Bernstein, a trustee of the Lawrence Foundation of New York.