In nonfiction, our winner is Jeremiah Barker for his essay “Bearing.” Of his essay, nonfiction judge Esmé Weijun Wang says, “The winning essay captured me immediately: both calm and confident, with a mature voice that carried me through a brilliantly written narrative of trauma. I am in awe of how adept this writer is at…
DeWitt Henry recommends a hundred little pieces on the end of the world by John Rember (U. of New Mexico Press, 2020). “Rember’s meditations ‘on teaching, writing, and friendship in an increasingly fragile world’ are, above all, alert, voracious, thoughtful, and life-read. From his prospect in Sawtooth Valley, Idaho, he offers clear-minded witness of our…
Charles Baxter, The Sun Collective (Pantheon Books, 2020). Peter Ho Davies, A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, January 2021). Rosanna Warren, So Forth (W.W. Norton, 2020). Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters (W. W. Norton, 2020).
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…
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…
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