“Please come flying,” Elizabeth Bishop pleads with Marianne Moore, in her poem “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore” (1955), “above the accidents, above the malignant movies, / the taxicabs and injustices at large.” This will—passed between two poets and friends—to alight from the predictable rhythms of crimes made regular, enmediated, and immense is an appealing one.
Every year at the open of the annual AWP Conference, we publish our gender statistics, taking a cue from VIDA’s important work. While we don’t collect demographic information on any of our writers, we publish the gender statistics of those whose gender identities we can find documented elsewhere (their work, their social media profiles, etc.)…
From childhood, we’re taught to see ourselves as others see us. We learn to synthesize “Head, shoulders, knees and toes” into a whole through a complex process of self-identification. We see who and what we’re taught to see, a looping phenomena that means we’re literally made up of story.
Last year, we announced our gender statistics following the release of the 2014 VIDA Count. We’re keeping with the tradition this year, and are happy to announce our count for 2015. The gender identity, race, sexuality, and disability disparities in the publishing industry are concerning, and we hope that making the Ploughshares demographic data transparent helps to emphasize…
I’ve written exactly one thing on Donald Trump. One piece felt like enough at the time—Got him!—though as a Mexican-American writer, I find myself wondering how many ways one could/should write about the phenomenon that is the rise of Trump and contemporary populist American bigotry. I’ve wondered too is that even my role as a…
VIDA released its much-awaited 2014 Count last night, contributing important data to a conversation that seems to have been getting louder over the past couple of months. The gender disparity in the world of literature is far-reaching, with every facet of publishing coming, quite rightly, under scrutiny. We at Ploughshares take this issue very seriously…
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