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.” …
Ploughshares is pleased to present Dantiel W. Moniz with the eighth annual Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction for her short story “Milk Blood Heat,” which appeared in the Spring 2018 issue, guest-edited by Lan Samantha Chang. The $2,500 prize, sponsored by member of the Ploughshares advisory board, longtime patron, acclaimed writer, and former guest editor…
When Julia fell down the basement stairs of Emmaus House and bruised her hip so badly she couldn’t stand, I should have made her congee to help her recover. The dish is easy enough to cook, only slightly more demanding than toast. It falls in the family of comfort-mush including oatmeal, polenta, farina, and grits….
What do you see when you see red? My mind free-associates: the red-light district. Little Red Corvette. Chanel number 99. Van Gogh said that orange is the color of insanity. In The Scarlet Letter, red is the mark of adultery. And then there was the time I was gossiping in the upscale NYC hair salon…
“Success is never so interesting as struggle.” —Willa Cather My sister was like a mother to her boyfriend’s four girls from the age of seventeen until she was twenty-two. Her boyfriend, José, was one of the local drug dealers. He went to the Nebraska State Penitentiary for two years for dealing methamphetamines. When José…
Malcriado Mom pried off a press-on nail and dropped it into her purse. I watched: The bag rattle as our cab flew over another pothole on our way to the airport where we were dropping her off. Mom bragging to the cabdriver about how this was going to be my first time staying in Nicaragua…
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