The Spring 2017 issue of Ploughshares. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Two out of each year’s three issues are guest-edited by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles; the Winter issue is staff-edited. Acclaimed writer Jennifer Haigh guest-edits this poetry and prose issue of Ploughshares. As Haigh writes in her introduction, “By training or habit or simply natural inclination, the writer of literature is sensitive to invisible currents in the culture. We are made of porous stuff, highly absorbent. The writer is the box of baking soda at the back of the refrigerator, absorbing whatever is ambient.” With new poetry from Kaveh Akbar and Matthew Lippman, nonfiction from Vendela Vida, and fiction from Smith Henderson, Kristen Iskandrian, and Jess Walter, the work in this issue grapples with the current cultural environment. The issue is dedicated to Thomas Lux (1946-2017), a guest editor and longtime friend of Ploughshares, and a former Poet-in-Residence of Emerson College.
Author
Jennifer Haigh is an American novelist and short story writer. Her new novel MERCY STREET takes on the contentious issue of abortion rights, following the daily life of Claudia Birch, a counselor at an embattled women's clinic in Boston. Her last novel, HEAT AND LIGHT, looks at a Pennsylvania town divided by the controversy over fracking, and was named a Best Book of 2016 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and NPR. Earlier books include the novel FAITH, about a beloved Boston priest accused of a molesting a child in his parish, and THE CONDITION, the story of a woman diagnosed in childhood with Turner's Syndrome. Haigh's critically acclaimed debut novel MRS. KIMBLE won the PEN/Hemingway Award for first fiction. Her second novel, the New York Times bestseller BAKER TOWERS, won the PEN/L. L. Winship Award for outstanding book by a New England author. Her short story collection NEWS FROM HEAVEN won of the Massachusetts Book Award and the PEN New England Award in Fiction. A Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, she writes frequently for The New York Times Book Review. Her fiction has been published in eighteen languages.
