Author: Laura van den Berg

For my last ever Ploughshares blog post (double sniff!), I bring you Part 2 of the Innovators in Literature Instant Replay. Many thanks to everyone who contributed to “Innovators in Lit,” read and commented on the interviews, and helped spread the word. After talking to 15 amazing literary innovators, I can’t help but feel that the future of…

Richard Nash is an independent publishing entrepreneur—VP of Community and Content of Small Demons, founder of Cursor, and Publisher of Red Lemonade. For most of the past decade, he ran the iconic indie Soft Skull Press for which he was awarded the Association of American Publishers’ Miriam Bass Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing in…

  Since my days as a Ploughshares guest blogger are numbered (sniff!), I wanted to devote a little time to recapping some highlights from past Innovators in Literature interviews. We’ve got Adam Robinson on YA, Alice Sebold on difficult characters, Zach Dodson on what featherproof books really wants, Matt Bell on literature that matters—and more!…

Jenna Johnson is Senior Editor for HMH hardcovers and Editorial Manager for Mariner paperbacks. Among her books are We the Animals, Pigeon English, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The End of Mr. Y, Man Asia Prize winner Three Sisters, and the James Beard winner Save the Deli. Among her authors are Steve Earle, Tim O’Brien, Kent Meyers, Tony D’Souza, Maggie…

BOMB Magazine was founded in 1981 as an artists’ and writers’ quarterly dedicated to presenting work in its own light, and artists’ and writers’ conversations in their own words. BOMB has since grown to become an international magazine with an editorial board of over 80 professional artists, writers, actors, directors, architects, and musicians serving as…

I first met Michele Filgate when she was the events coordinator at the wonderful RiverRun Books in Portsmouth, NH. She is now the events coordinator for the equally awesome McNally Jackson. In addition to her career in indie bookselling, Michele is an accomplished critic—she contributes regularly to Bookslut and The Minneapolis Star Tribune—and was an early…

  New Directions was founded in 1936, when James Laughlin issued the first of the New Directions anthologies, which introduced readers to the early work of William Saroyan, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Delmore Schwartz, Dylan Thomas, John Hawkes, Denise Levertov, James Agee, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, among others. New Directions recently celebrated 75 years, and I…

Molly Gaudry is the author of We Take Me Apart, which was a finalist for the Asian American Literary Awards for Poetry and has been shortlisted for the 2011 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. She runs Cow Heavy Books and is the founder of The Lit Pub, one of the most ambitious literary enterprises I’ve come…

Lookout Books, the literary imprint at UNC Wilmington, was founded by Emily Louise Smith, director of The Publishing Laboratory, and Ben George, editor of Ecotone. Lookout gained national attention when their debut title, Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision, landed a cover review in the New York Times, with Pearlman going on to win the PEN/Malamud for…