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In this interview, Editor-in-Chief Jenny Molberg speaks with former Ploughshares Poetry Editor and Interim Editor-in-Chief John Skoyles about balancing editing and writing, championing emerging writers, and navigating the challenges of writing from personal experience. The conversation concludes with a reading of one of Skoyles’s poems. Since 2007, John Skoyles served as Ploughshares’ Poetry…
On June 26, 2026, Ploughshares hosted a reading and celebration of LGBTQIA+ love poems published in the journal, featuring readings from Kelli Russell Agodon, Chen Chen, Eileen Myles, Jacques J. Rancourt, Jaz Sufi, and Mark Wunderlich. The event was co-hosted by Ploughshares’ Editor-in-chief Jenny Molberg and Senior Reader Kit Freeman. The post A Celebration of Love Poetry Reading appeared first…
The academy often advocates for historically canonical poets—poetic landmarks of sorts, like Eliot, Pound, or Milton—but queer writers have been known to build their own landmarks. In contemporary poetry, for example, Jericho Brown’s Duplex subverts traditional received forms like the pantoum and the sonnet, which, in his words, builds “a gesture towards home.” Other poets might... The post The…
As readers, we pride ourselves on curating our personal libraries because they visually represent the collection of genres, forms, and authors we admire most. My bookshelf is a disorganized rainbow of dark-spined British literature anthologies, vibrant blue-green-white contemporary paperbacks, and yellowing copies of my favorites, including Little Women, The Secret History, and The Handmaid’s…
In April 2026, we hosted Gabrielle Bates, Jane Huffman, Jenna Le, Karen Winn, and Annie Finch for a reading at Trident Booksellers in celebration of our Spring 2026 launch. Filming and editing by Jonny Ulasien. The post Spring 2026 Issue Launch Party appeared first on Ploughshares .
Ploughshares is excited to announce our new partnership with The Unsung Masters Series. The Unsung Masters Series, supported by The University of Houston, Gulf Coast, Copper Nickel, and Pleiades, publishes and distributes one book a year that showcases an important writer who has been unjustly neglected and/or whose work is currently out of print. Each... The post Recovery as Resistance: Rolando…
I went to the Divinity School because I have no faith. I didn’t lose it. I never had it. I don’t believe in politics or in religion, in God or angels. I don’t believe in families or in friendship. I don’t believe in unconditional love. I don’t believe in love at all. That is, as... The post Alice Hoffman on Reading and Writing about St. Teresa of Ávila appeared first on Ploughshares .
“You are too nice,” Kathryn Harrison once said to me. Or perhaps what she said was, “You are very nice!” but to me it sounded like the same thing. I admired and admire Kathryn. She is an astonishing writer and an astonishing soul. Several years ago, she guest-edited an issue of Ploughshares, and she devoted it... The post Losing My Maps appeared first on Ploughshares .
For our inaugural PS post, please enjoy this conversation with Kathryn Nuernberger, Heidi Czerwiec, and Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh about the evolution of lyric essays as seen in the writing of Maxine Kumin, Annie Dillard, and Toi Derricotte, originally published in Ploughshares and linked below. The post Poets’ Journals and the Essayists Who Wrote Them appeared first on Ploughshares .
