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Today’s post is my last for the Ploughshares blog and it just happens to coincide with the beginning of Season Five of Friday Night Lights. Good times all around. Big ups to everyone who read my posts. I know they weren’t always directly related to the craft of writing, but it’s all part of the…

I want to preface this whole thing by saying that I’m not writing this because of the Rankine/Hoagland debate that sprung up in/around/after AWP. I’m happy that conversation is in existence, and I’m glad people are debating notions of voice, ownership, and race, but that’s not necessarily where this started. I should also mention that I was thinking about this stuff before I…

Because several of my preceding posts have been very earnest, and also, possibly, a little depressing, I thought that it might be nice to end my tenure as a Ploughshares blogger on an upbeat note.  With this in mind, I recently asked a group of anonymous literary authorities to comment on some of the writing…

Disclaimer: I tried to avoid anything that would compromise the Friday Night Lights narrative for those who haven’t picked up on it yet. But seriously, if you haven’t watched the show, you should hit up Netflix right away. * In Atlanta last Christmas, I got trapped like Jack Torrance by the first Yuletide snow that…

Here’s my proposal: I think all of us who write and submit creative work for publication should, for every ten submissions we send out, review at least one book for publication somewhere—Bookslut, Rain Taxi, the Rumpus, wherever. There should be some cut-off point—let’s say after you’ve got at least two books of your own, your…

We would like to congratulate our editor-in-chief, Ladette Randolph, on the release of her novel, A Sandhills Ballad, in paperback.  To celebrate, Ladette will read from the novel on April 13th at 7 pm at Newtonville Books in Newton, MA.  She will read along with Monica McInerny, author of At Home with the Templetons. For more…

Whether I’m a spectator at a reading or taking part in one, two questions that I often hear during the Q & A session are “When do you get your writing done?” and “Do you have a set schedule?”  Despite having heard these questions many times before, I’m still interested in the responses.  Whether or…

Originally from Alabama, Jake Adam York is Associate Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Colorado Denver. He is the author of three books of poems—Murder Ballads (Elixir Press, 2005), A Murmuration of Starlings (Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), which was a winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry…

Valerie Brennan is the artist whose painting appears on the cover of our Spring 2011 issue, guest edited by Colm Toibin.  I (the web/marketing editor here at Ploughshares) asked her a few questions about this particular painting, current inspirations, and her work in general. Ploughshares: First off, is there an answer to the question “What…