About PS
Welcome to PS! PS is Ploughshares’ tribute to our literary histories; an addendum to our print issues. PS presents contemporary dialogues between today’s writers and Ploughshares‘ archive–love letters that revisit, remix, and reimagine our literary past, present, and future. Here you’ll find essays, interviews, recordings, and other multimedia ephemera in direct conversation with our current issue and 50+ year archive.
Pitching to PS
Before submitting a pitch to PS, we encourage you to learn more about Ploughshares‘ history and explore our extensive list of previously published authors and guest editors. Please note that you will not be able to access the Ploughshares archive in its entirety without an archive subscription; however, you can browse a selection of publicly accessible pieces in every issue as well as the full tables of contents. If your pitch is accepted, you will receive a free 1-year digital archive subscription to support the research of your piece.
With our ongoing mission to champion emerging and established writers alike, we invite you to consider how your practice converses, converges, and complicates work in our past issues. You might wish to consider any of the following questions:
- How are certain forms, themes, and writers in our past issues relevant to today’s literary movements and trends?
- What contemporary writers are working in conversation with/against a past Ploughshares contributor?
- How might your current preoccupations and obsessions as a writer work alongside or against the work we’ve previously published?
In an effort to provide free and accessible multimedia content that can be enjoyed in classrooms, writing groups, workshops, or during your commute, our goal is to supplement our original content with written, auditory, and visual media. This content will live online on the PS page and below the original piece as a modern-day postscript.
Your pitch should fall under one of three categories that engages with the Ploughshares archive: Dialogues (transcribed and recorded interviews/conversations), Essays (personal, critical, academic, creative), or Ephemera (multimodal supplements to Ploughshares’ archive such as photos, video recordings, artwork, letters).
Once accepted, we will gift PS contributors a free 1-year digital archive subscription to support the research of this project. PS writers are paid $100 upon publication. Please note that written PS pieces have a maximum of 5,000 words, and video contributions must be an hour or less.
When submitting a pitch to PS in the form below, please select the genre you wish to submit to. Your pitch should be up to 5,000 characters (700-1,000 words). In your pitch, be sure to describe your intended theme or lens for your PS contribution, its format, and how it directly correlates to one or more publications in the Ploughshares archive. Please note that queries for standard book reviews will not be considered without a connection to the archive.