When Norman Macleod (1906-1985) founded Pembroke Magazine in 1969, he had already edited some of the top "little" magazines in the country: Jackass, which he founded in 1927 while attending the University of New Mexico; Morada (1929-1930) (Morada's second issue was devoted to Harry Crosby with whom Macleod had been corresponding before Crosby's suicide in December 1929); Front, which lasted for four issues and contained work by Ezra Pound, Robert McAlmon, John Dos Passos, and other writers of the avant-garde; Maryland Quarterly, which Macleod founded in 1944 while teaching at the University of Maryland; and the Briarcliff Quarterly, which was Maryland Quarterly renamed because Macleod took a teaching job at Briarcliff Junior College in 1945.  Of these, perhaps the Briarcliff Quarterly was best known because of its devotion to the works of William Carlos Williams.

        Macleod edited the first ten issues of Pembroke Magazine, which has been published annually since 1969.  The magazine has grown from a student publication of forty-eight pages in 1969 to a three-hundred-page publication international in scope.  It is open to poetry, fiction, nonfiction, interviews, and visual arts (painting, graphics, sculpture).  The linked descriptions of each issue found below showPembroke Magazine's development and indicates the issue in which work by individual authors may be found.