Gourds cover everything, even spilling onto the sidewalk, practically falling into the cobblestone street. Orange, green, white, even pink gourds, everywhere on my block. I see them, of course. I just don’t think too much about them. It’s autumn. Gourd season. Then one day, I’m sitting in my car for an hour and a half…
My Tante Hilde lived for over fifty years in a moshav across the road from an Israeli Arab village north of Acre. After every war, suicide bombing, and assassination, she would shake her head and say, “If it weren’t for the leaders, this wouldn’t happen!” She was talking about what she knew personally: the Arab…
In nonfiction, our winner is Megan Valley, for her essay “Painstaking Preservation.” Of the story, nonfiction judge Danielle Geller says, “To be uncertain is to be uncomfortable; to be unsure is to be unsteady, but to be a person of conviction, one must turn a blind eye to all the faults…
“Is there a poetry of peace?” asked the poet Denise Levertov in her 1989 essay, “Poetry and Peace: Some Broader Dimensions,” only to answer in that very essay: “No.” After all, how can there be a poetry of something that was never deeply experienced, never deeply felt? She claimed that, like a poem, peace cannot…
Ploughshares is pleased to present Lara Egger with the thirty-second annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for her poetry collection How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021). The $1,500 award, which is named after Emerson College’s former president, honors the best debut book by a Ploughshares…
Edward Hirsch, The Heart of American Poetry (Library of America, 2022) Dan Wakefield, Kurt Vonnegut, The Making of a Writer (Seven Stories Press, 2022) Madison Smartt Bell, The Witch of Matongé (Concord Free Press, 2022)
Peter Ho Davies recommends A Down Home Meal for these Difficult Times, by Meron Hadero (Restless Books, 2022). “A brilliant debut collection of stories of the Ethiopian diaspora, by a writer whose work has appeared in Ploughshares and Best American Short Stories.” Peter Ho Davies recommends Tale of the Dreamer’s Son, by Preeta Samarasan (World…
That Sunday morning, long ago, a golden light trickled in through the window of my basement apartment and stung my boyfriend and me. It stung our eyes and stung our hearts to see our predicament sharply outlined: It was late October in Reykjavik and the sun had come to say goodbye. We’d be left in…
It’s a small mark, quick cut, a single stroke. An incident, not the main event, on the page—more flicked than drawn, starting at the top and moving, diagonally, down to the left. A diacritic. It’s a diacritic. I don’t want to use the word accent. (That question, which plagues me in the francophone world: D’où…
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