Nonfiction

  • Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction

    The Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction Ploughshares is pleased to present Angela Pneuman with the first annual Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction for her short story, “Occupational Hazard,” which appeared in the Spring 2011 issue of Ploughshares, guest edited by Colm Tóibín. The $1,000 award, given by acclaimed writer and Ploughshares advisory editor Alice Hoffman,…

  • Introduction

    When you visit the statue of Montaigne in Paris, you find him amidst overgrown greenery, almost sequestered in the bushes across from the Sorbonne, as if preferring, in bronze, the margin he chose in life. The first thing you notice is his shoe. Even at night, when I came upon him, the shoe emerges first,…

  • Introduction

    Grizzly bears, electric bears, fire bears—these three are the most dangerous bears, my three-year-old daughter informs me. I don’t know how she knows what she knows, yet she knows many things. Lately it is all about bears. Electric bears? I ask her. I’ve never seen an electric bear. If you go into his cave, he…

  • Introduction

    For this fortieth anniversary issue, I invited former guest editors to contribute new work of their own, to nominate and introduce an emerging writer, or to give an account of turning points in their careers. Among the twenty-five who responded, I include here fiction writers, nonfiction writers, and poets. Longtime Ploughshares readers will recognize the…

  • Introduction

    It was 1986 and I was staying with my brother in Omdurman close to Khartoum, where the White Nile and the Blue Nile meet. Omdurman was vast, the size of the city, but it was not a city in any way that I recognized. There were no wide streets or squares or municipal buildings, and…

  • Introduction

    Sometimes when I’m asked to account for my weirdness—by those sympathetic enough to have not given up on me—I remember that Edward Gorey responded to the same request by remarking that the first two books he remembered reading as a child were Alice in Wonderland and Dracula, and so I offer my own origins story,…

  • Introduction

    There was something secretive about it. When I walked into the library and turned right and kept walking, they were there. Had I ever seen a magazine before I got to college? I had. Had I ever seen a literary journal? I had not. I was a seventeen-year-old girl who left high school a year…

  • Evidence of Things Unseen

    Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. —Hebrews 11:1 1. Morphine makes me small, airborne. Like a spider. I rest in a high corner of the ceiling, look down on my body on the white hospital bed. It was just one shot, one needle through my skin….