Cohen Awards Each year, we honor the best short story and poem published in Ploughshares with the Cohen Awards, which are wholly sponsored by our longtime patrons Denise and Mel Cohen. Finalists are nominated by staff editors, and the winners—each of whom receives a cash prize of $600—are selected by our advisory editors. The 2003…
Recommendation: I’m proud to nominate Patrick Michael Finn, one of my most accomplished, prolific former students and one of my favorite writers. Mr. Finn remains someone I talk about quite often, though he graduated in 1997, and someone whose stories have never left my mind. I still remember his characters—lonely Joliet teenagers struggling with religion and…
When I first read the announcement for the Ploughshares Emerging Writers Issue I immediately thought of Ted Mathys, a poet whose talent reminds one of Hart Crane, and not just because Ted is also from Ohio and now lives in New York, but because of the preternatural facility for language they share as well as…
Our congratulations to the following writers, whose work has been selected for these anthologies: Best Stories—ZZ Packer’s "Every Tongue Shall Confess" and Sharon Pomerantz’s "Ghost Knife," both from the Fall 2002 issue edited by Margot Livesey, will be included in The Best American Short Stories 2003. The anthology is due out this October from Houghton…
Recommendation: Fresh from the undergraduate program at Chapel Hill, Julie Funderburk was in my first class of M.F.A. poetry students in the fall of 1992. Since then we have been colleagues and fellow poets, and I have been witness to more than ten years of development in her poetry and poetics. Essentially Julie is a…
Recommendation: Jill McDonough’s poems are lyrical founts of energy and insight and humor and empathy. She’s a daring poet, formally sophisticated yet pushing the boundaries of form at every turn. In the four or five years I’ve known her poems, their subjects have dazzled me: a bumptious American girl teaching in Japan and loving the…
We’re sad to announce that Susan Conley has moved to Maine and will no longer be serving as our Associate Poetry Editor. She had worked for Ploughshares in various capacities since 1996. We thank her for her dedicated service, and we wish her the best.
Recommendation: Alexai grew up and still lives in a Chicago neighborhood known as Pilsen/Little Village. It’s the largest barrio east of L.A. The neighborhood is the locus of Mexican culture in the Midwest. It is plagued by the usual economic problems that plague most immigrations, and in particular by street gangs. What attracts me to…
John C. Zacharis Award Ploughshares is pleased to present Maile Meloy with the thirteenth annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for her collection of stories, Half in Love (Scribner, 2002). The $1,500 award—which is named after Emerson College’s former president—honors the best debut book by a Ploughshares writer, alternating annually between fiction and poetry….
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