Ploughshares is pleased to present Belle Boggs with the first annual Ashley Leigh Bourne Prize for Fiction for her short story “In the Shadow of Man,” which appeared in the Summer 2018 issue, guest-edited by Jill McCorkle. The $2,500 prize, sponsored by longtime patron Hunter C. Bourne III and selected by our editors, honors a…
Here is the sequence of events from my perspective. I stopped at the stop light, in the right lane. It was early enough in the morning that I did not quite have my wits about me. But that doesn’t matter. I saw a group of five white women, all dressed alike, in tight-fitting black shorts…
A self consists primarily of unremembered events. The highest number of memories forgotten about a particular person will disappear from the mind of that same person. Usually this happens involuntarily, but some people suppress certain memories. Occurrences tangential to the person tend to retain even less staying power. Many of the moments relating to the…
A plane crashed under mysterious circumstances in a country with a dense and sparsely populated rainforest. None of the passengers or crew survived. Because of the nature of the accident, many parts of the plane had scattered over a wide area, which made what would prove a difficult investigation almost impossible. People from nearby villages…
My high-school English teacher Ms. Dachs did three things I remember my senior year: she cried openly in front of the class on September 12, 2001; she introduced us to William Safire’s column “On Language”; and she played a cassette tape of George Carlin’s stand-up bit on euphemisms. That’s all I have of her. (What…
Every time I am asked to edit something, I tell myself, Don’t do it. You hate editing. And every time I finish editing something, I am always relieved. Nothing has differed for this issue of Ploughshares. So why did I take on the guest editor role? Because editing matters. I am committed to literature as…
Not long ago I walked into my graduate poetry workshop at Rutgers-Newark, where I have been teaching for the last decade. It was a Monday, and I carried into the classroom the weight of a new burden: the US Department of Health and Human Services had just proposed to establish a legal definition of gender…
Tess Gallagher, Is, Is Not, poems (Graywolf Press, May 2019) Tony Hoagland, The Art of Voice: Poetic Principles and Practice (W.W. Norton, March 2019)
Lauren Groff recommends Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot (Counterpoint, 2018). “I’ve been haunted by this talented writer’s first memoir since I read it a month ago. It is knife-sharp and beautifully strange and so full of both kinds of madness that the madness seems to leak through the text and into the reader.” …
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