"The Anvil" was begun by publisher Robert V. "Bob" Brown (June 10, 1933 – February 5, 2006), who had previously published a mimeographed civil rights newsletter, "Chapel Hill Conscience", during 1963–1964, and the literary magazine "Reflections from Chapel Hill", and award-winning poet and fiction writer Leon Rooke, who had been employed in the News Bureau of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and had been the fiction editor for "Reflections".