A Letter from Jenny Molberg, Editor-in-Chief

Dear Readers and Friends,

I am thrilled to join the masthead at Ploughshares as the new Editor-in-Chief. For decades, Ploughshares has been a journal I’ve admired for its deep care, its editorial rigor, and its unwavering insistence that literature matters. That belief is at the core of my work as an editor, poet, and teacher.

bell hooks writes, “I write…to bear witness to the primacy of resistance struggle in any situation of domination…to the strength and power that emerges from sustained resistance and the profound conviction that these forces can be healing, can protect us from dehumanization and despair.” This idea—that literature can serve as a healing redirection, what Seamus Heaney called “the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality”—is beautifully captured in the ploughshare, a symbol of peace: swords beaten into agricultural tools.

I think of great writing as advocacy for conditions of peace—a repurposing of toxic power and suffering—a call for action, for radical joy. Through this lens, I recognize my responsibilities to the authors I help edit and usher into the world, the students I teach, and the literary world writ large. At a time when the arts and humanities face increasing threats, our work as writers and editors feels more urgent than ever. In this role, I aim to foreground that urgency—locally, nationally, and globally.

It is an honor to carry on the legacy of Ploughshares’ recent editors, John Skoyles and Ladette Randolph, and further back to the journal’s founders, DeWitt Henry and Peter O’Malley. I am grateful for the warm reception from the outstanding staff at Ploughshares, and I look forward to continuing the tradition of publishing great literature by emerging and established writers.

Yours,

Jenny Molberg

Jenny Molberg is the author of three poetry collections: Marvels of the Invisible (Tupelo Press, 2017), winner of the Berkshire Prize; Refusal (LSU Press, 2020); and The Court of No Record (LSU Press, 2023), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She edited the Unsung Masters volume Adelaide Crapsey: On the Life and Work of an American Master, and her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, AGNI, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. Molberg has received fellowships and residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Hambidge Center, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Longleaf Writers Conference. Formerly Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Central Missouri, where she directed Pleiades Press and edited Pleiades: Literature in Context, she is now Professor of Writing, Literature, and Publishing and Editor-in-Chief of Ploughshares at Emerson College.