On the occasion of Ray Bradbury’s one-hundredth birthday, we are still discovering the depth of his genius as his imagined future becomes our present. When Ray Bradbury began writing, the term magical realism hadn’t yet been invented. He was dubbed a fantasy writer, for those who wrote about magic or about the future or about…
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…
This is a letter from the past to the future. All writing is, of course. In our moment in time, we put words on paper and hope that later someone will read them and recognize the people and the feelings we’re describing. No matter how many miles or years separate us from our readers, if…
I need you to tell the truth, to tell the mean stories, and to sing the song of hope. —Dorothy Allison, Skin What I remember, mostly, is the orange tag. It had no place for a name—just er visitor printed in sharp uppercase letters, so that’s who I became. For three days, I hid…
If, in William Penn’s words, America was “a good poor Man’s country” and remained the dream of a promised land for Europe’s impoverished up to the beginning of the twentieth century, it is no less true that this goodness depended to a considerable degree on black misery. —Hannah Arendt. On a steamy August day,…
Ploughshares is pleased to present Mario Alberto Zambrano with the ninth annual Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction for his short story “Some of You,” which appeared in the Spring 2019 issue, guest-edited by Rigoberto González. The $2,500 prize, sponsored Alice Hoffman, acclaimed writer, former guest editor, longtime patron, and member of the Ploughshares advisory board,…
One evening early in the new year, my ten-year-old confided that she was worried about something. Between the demands of school and the dynamics of friends, let alone all the changes dawning around and within her, I wasn’t surprised to learn she might be nervous about something. But her fear caught me off guard. “I’m…
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