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Mark Wunderlich is a poet from the Midwest living in Hudson Valley, teaching at Bennington College. He’s received many fellowships, including those from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Megan Mayhew Bergman interviewed him for Ploughshares on craft, place, and essential reading for the new reader of…
A published letter is a strange act. It’s like a whisper made into a loudspeaker. It’s a secret note the town’s tacked onto the city hall bulletin board after the carrier pigeon nosedived into the public square. It’s intimacy externalized. Some letters seem to speak to no one at all, but the best letters, though…
I’ve been aware of Allan Gurganus since I was a few years old; we hail from the same small town, Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and his books lined the shelves of homes I visited, and the local library. Turns out his name was also in the New Yorker, and when I was nine, his book…
Ploughshares publishes writers who go on to achieve major accolades and awards within the literature community. Since its founding in 1971, stories, poems, and essays from Ploughshares have appeared over 150 times in the following award series anthologies: The Best American Poetry, The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, The O. Henry Prize…
2023 Fiction, selected by Gish Jen Mengyin Lin, “No prairie fire can destroy all the weeds.” Honorable Mention: Steve Chang, “Tell Me What I’m Waiting For” Nonfiction, selected by Meghan O’Rourke Jen Lazar, “The End of What We Know” Honorable Mention: Robin Babb, “The Iron Lung” Poetry, selected by Sandra Cisneros Logan Klutse, “Bronx Operating Room”; “Learning…
Over the next couple of days, we ask you to join us in a literary experiment. Our test subject is Megan Mayhew Bergman, the lovely author of Birds of a Lesser Paradise: Stories and former contributor to an issue of Ploughshares, our Ploughshares Solos series, and this very blog. In this partnership between Medium and…
In our Roundups segment, we’re looking back at all the great posts since the blog started in 2009. We explore posts from our archives as well as other top literary magazines and websites, centered on a certain theme to help you jump-start your week. We’ve had a few posts lately at our blog about the…
It’s a digital age, but we’re still mad for paper! Even as readers embrace the connectivity and convenience offered by iPads and Kindles, there are still many good reasons to celebrate a book’s physicality. In Ploughshares’ Book Arts series, we’ll be looking at some of the artists, curators, and craftspeople who work to keep things…
Part of the sharing that comes with the holiday season is that beautiful and funny thing nostalgia. Think back to when your were just a kid, back to when the holiday season was more than consumer sales and bustling about the kitchen with a turkey baster in one hand. It was a time when the…
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