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…
Edward Hirsch, Stranger by Night (Knopf, February 2020).
Tess Gallagher recommends My Name Is Not Viola by Lawrence Matsuda (Endicott and Hugh Books, 2019). “My Name Is Not Viola belongs to all of us who wish to experience the WWII Japanese American forced incarceration heartbeat through the eyes of Hanae Tamura. As one of the 120,000 victims jailed without due process, she was…
In nonfiction, our winner is Jung Hae Chae for her story “Pojangmacha People.” Of her essay, nonfiction judge Leslie Jamison said, “A searing lyric built of sweat and salt and sorrow, hot soup and deep shame—an ode to the elderly drunk men seeking solace in the “tiny domed cathedral” of every drinking hut along the…
Ploughshares is pleased to present Xuan Juliana Wang with the twenty-ninth annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for her collection, Home Remedies (Hogarth, 2019). 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 and fiction. This year’s judge was…
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