Nonfiction

The Person in Question

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…

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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…

Prison in the Age of Euphemisms

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…

Introduction

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…

Introduction

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…

Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction

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…

Julia’s Stepchild

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….