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The day after I played the best game of my middle school basketball career, I read an article explaining the physics of the jump shot. According to the author, there is only a two-ounce difference in pressure between a shot that hits the front of the rim and one that hits the back. There are…

I’m not sure the Ploughshares blog is the perfect venue to feature an interview with the editor of another literary journal, but I’m 100% sure that those who read Ploughshares 1) probably know about other literary journals, and therefore could (and I’d argue should) be interested in them, and 2) read good writing, and could…

Not long ago, I attended a reading in Chicago that featured a talented Brooklyn-based novelist and a long-time friend of hers who had recently published a memoir.  During the Q & A session that followed their reading, an attendee asked the memoirist if she had ever considered writing fiction.  The memoirist’s reply was one that…

Disclaimer: For those who haven’t experienced David Simon’s HBO series The Wire, you should probably tune out now and hit up your Netflix. Same thing goes to those Wire fans who haven’t finished Season Four. I don’t want to spoil the narrative arc of the season for you. * In my vision, Michael Lee is…

Before I even begin talking about Jennifer Boyden I have to hold myself back a little, and that’s because I happened to travel to New York in the summer of 2002, and I happened to bring with me a copy of a lit journal, and in that journal was a poem by Jennifer Boyden which…

I had been writing fiction for fifteen years and publishing stories in literary journals for ten when Supriya Bhatnagar, the publications director at AWP, called me on a mid-May day in 2009.  Listening to her brief message an hour later, I wondered if some pages were missing from the manuscript I had submitted for the…

Like most writers who are willing to admit it, my favorite poetry anthologies are either ones I’m in or ones I wish I was in: From the Fishouse, Seriously Funny, and Gathering Ground come to mind first. In truth, I’d love the quality and scope of these anthologies even if I wasn’t included in them….

There may be no writer more deserving of massive attention than Matthew Zapruder, and, thankfully, 2010 seems to have been the year he got caught up to. His latest, Come On All You Ghosts, was named in all sorts of year-end lists, and rightly so: the man’s writing some of the best poetry anywhere, and…

Ellen, Rosanne, Whoopi, Tina.  They’re women, they tell jokes, and we’re on a first-name basis.  These comedians have imposing brains but often focus on their thighs: they write frequently about their relationship with food, this being one theme that connects them.  On the popular NBC sitcom 30 Rock, Tina Fey’s character Liz Lemon is known…