Alice Hoffman is a prolific writer with a bent toward the magical and luminous, and it’s easy to imagine her at some fantastical loom, spinning tales of daily life turned to myth. In the real world, though, she works quietly and consistently out of an old Victorian house near Boston that she shares with her…
Recommendation: Rachel DeWoskin’s poems have astonishing dash and verve: they are fun to read, and they cut deep; they know when to stop and how to surprise. Her years in China give her material but she writes about it with a smart, revealing precision that is the opposite of mere touristic exoticism. I think she…
Recommendation: Mark M. Martin is a recent graduate of the M.F.A. program at Florida International University. I am a big fan of his work—so much so that I solicited him for an anthology that my husband and I edited that includes such poets as Andrew Hudgins, Colette Inez, and Stephen Dunn. His poem has already…
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…
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