Ploughshares is pleased to present Jill Osier with the thirtieth annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for her poetry collection, The Solace Is Not the Lullaby (Yale University Press, 2020). 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 poetry…
1. Unless Henry was losing his mind, the laser printer at work had apparently attained some level of self-awareness. It must have happened during lunch Friday, because when he left his desk to grab a sandwich at the place downstairs, it was just a regular printer. 2. Specifically, it was an HP LaserJet Pro…
We left earlier than usual. The sun was barely peeking over the mountains. I was tired, but I didn’t make the schedule; SeaWorld made it, and the orcas made SeaWorld’s schedule. A couple months before, a buddy had told me SeaWorld was looking for orca hunters. It sounded cooler than it turned out to be,…
He lies clenched on his hard cot. The acrid smell of smoke bites. It’s been like this for weeks, covering everything. Fires starting all spring kicked up by the high winds. He tosses the sheet off. He’s got the suntan of a worker—pale torso, brown arms and legs. As he ages he gets furrier, his…
Snow Yu was not a bad mother; she was an overwhelmed mother. How could she not be overwhelmed by the size of her love for her daughter? It was a fierce and awesome thing. Unprecedented, as far as her own life was concerned. It seemed impossible that her heart had expanded as it had without…
On the day she will receive the terrible news, no one offers Ludmila and Antosha seats on the rush-hour train. “Hold on to the pole with both hands,” she instructs her grandson, but he’s distracted, opening his sweaty palm again to check that the tooth hasn’t disappeared. The previous night, Ludmila tied the loose tooth…
Ploughshares is pleased to present Kiley Reid with the second annual Ashley Leigh Bourne Prize for Fiction for her short story “George Washington’s Teeth,” which appeared in the Fall 2019 issue, edited by Editor-in-chief Ladette Randolph. The $2,500 prize, sponsored by longtime patron Hunter C. Bourne III and selected by our editors, honors a short…
Jane Hirshfield, Ledger, Knopf (March 2020). Alice Hoffman, Magic Lessons, Simon & Schuster (October 2020).
Rosellen Brown recommends Everywhere You Don’t Belong, a novel by Gabriel Bump (Algonquin, February 2020). “The immensely talented Bump’s first book is an odd and original portrait of, and by, a Black kid from the South Side of Chicago who’s a fierce reporter of the affection and the disaffection that roil his community. There’s violence…
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