Ploughshares :: NewPages Guide to Literary Magazines

Ploughshares

Emerson College

120 Boylston Street

Boston, MA 02116

Phone: (617) 824-3757

E-mail: pshares[at]emerson[dot]edu

Simultaneous submissions: yes Email submissions: no Online submissions: yes (see website) Reading period: 6/1-1/15 Response time: approximately 2-4 months Payment: yes (see website) Contests: yes (see website) ISSN: 0048-4474 Founded: 1971 Issues per year: 3 Distributors: Ubiquity, Source Interlink Copy price: $14 Average pages: 220 Sample price (postpaid): $9.25 (back issues), $16.25 (US), $19 (CAD), $24.50 (foreign) Subscription (Ind/Inst) 1 year: $30 (US), $39.99 (CAD), $60 (foreign)

Publisher's description: Ploughshares was founded in 1971 by DeWitt Henry and Peter O'Malley in the Plough and Stars, an Irish pub in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Since 1989, Ploughshares has been based at Emerson College, which hosts one of the best M.F.A. programs in creative writing in the country. Published in April, August, and December in quality paperback, each issue is guest-edited by a prominent writer who explores personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles. Over the years, guest editors of Ploughshares have included Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Rosellen Brown, Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, Sherman Alexie, Russell Banks, Lorrie Moore, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Richard Ford. Guest editors have been the recipients of Nobel and Pulitzer prizes, National Book Awards, MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, and numerous other honors.

Many of today's most respected writers had their first or early work published in Ploughshares, including Thomas Lux, Susan Straight, Carolyn Chute, Edward P. Jones, Howard Norman, Melanie Rae Thon, Sue Miller, Mona Simpson, Ethan Canin, Tim O'Brien, Robert Pinsky, and Jayne Anne Phillips. It's no wonder, then, that Literary Magazine Review has proclaimed Ploughshares to be "a magazine that has published a good deal of what has become our significant contemporary American literature."

Recent issues:

Guest editor Nick Flynn selects and introduces a diverse collection of poems, essays, and stories. The issue (38.1, Spring 2012) features everything from Eric Fair's essay Consequence, on being an interrogator at Abu Ghraib, to Major Jackson's list poem, "Why I Write Poetry." A stylistically varied issue featuring several emerging poets like Samuel Amadon and Sophie Klahr, as well as established writers such as Mark Slouka, D. A. Powell, Claudia Rankine, and others.

Guest-editor Alice Hoffman chooses work for this issue (37.4, Winter 2011-12), some with her own fairy tale sensibility – like William Giraldi's story of wolves carrying away children, and Rachel Kadish's piece about the Russian folk witch Baba Yaga – and others in a more realist vein, such as stories by Jennifer Haigh and Ann Hood. The issue also features poetry by Ursula K. Le Guin, Marge Piercy, and Philip Schultz, and a story by Emerging Fiction Writer's Contest winner Thomas Lee. To celebrate its 40th anniversary year, Ploughshares also reaches into its archives for an interview with Elizabeth Bishop, now expanded with never-before-published content.

Special 40th anniversary issue (37.2 & 3, Fall 2011) edited by Ploughshares co-founder DeWitt Henry features new work from former guest editors like Alice Hoffman, Sue Miller, and Maxine Kumin; an interview with Richard Yates from the archives; and poems and stories from emerging writers like James Scott and Laura van den Berg, introduced by prominent authors.