Ploughshares Summer 2025 Guest-edited by Victor LaValle

By Helen Phillips, Joanna Pearson, Victor LaValle, and more

2025

First Published

4.00

Average Rating

234

Number of Pages

7H06M

Audio Length

The Summer 2025 Issue. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Since 1971, Ploughshares has discovered and cultivated the freshest voices in contemporary American literature, and now provides readers with thoughtful and entertaining literature in a variety of formats. Find out why the New York Times named Ploughshares “the Triton among minnows.” The Summer 2025 issue, edited by Victor LaValle, features prose by Helen Phillips, Deesha Philyaw, S.A. Cosby, Joanna Pearson, Carolyn Ferrell, and more.

Avg Rating

4.00

Number of Ratings

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Authors

Victor LaValle is the author of the short story collection Slapboxing with Jesus, four novels, The Ecstatic, Big Machine, The Devil in Silver, and The Changeling and two novellas, Lucretia and the Kroons and The Ballad of Black Tom. He is also the creator and writer of a comic book Victor LaValle's DESTROYER. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including a Whiting Writers' Award, a United States Artists Ford Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Shirley Jackson Award, an American Book Award, and the key to Southeast Queens. He was raised in Queens, New York. He now lives in Washington Heights with his wife and kids. He teaches at Columbia University. He can be kind of hard to reach, but he still loves you.

Rachel Mans McKenny

Author · 2 books

Rachel Mans McKenny is a writer and humorist from the Midwest. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Washington Post, McSweeney's, Elle, InStyle, and other outlets. The Butterfly Effect is her debut novel.

Deesha Philyaw's collection of short stories about Black women, sex, and the Black church, THE SECRET LIVES OF CHURCH LADIES is forthcoming from West Virginia University Press in Sept. 1, 2020. Deesha is the co-author of Co-Parenting 101: Helping Your Kids Thrive in Two Households After Divorce, written in collaboration with her ex-husband. Her work has been listed as Notable in the Best American Essays series, and her writing on race, parenting, gender, and culture has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, Brevity, dead housekeeping, Apogee Journal, Catapult, Cheat River Review, TueNight, ESPN’s The Undefeated and The Baltimore Review; Essence, Ebony, and Bitch magazines; and various anthologies. Deesha is a Fellow at the Kimbilio Center for African American Fiction and a past Pushcart Prize nominee for essay writing in Full Grown People.

Carolyn Ferrell is the author of the short-story collection, Don’t Erase Me, which was awarded the Art Seidenbaum Award of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize program, the John C. Zacharis Award given by Ploughshares, and the Quality Paperback Book Prize for First Fiction. She has also received grants from the Fulbright Association, German Academic Exchange (DAAD), City University of New York MAGNET Program, and National Endowment for the Arts. Ferrell’s stories have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories 2018 and The Best American Short Stories of the Century, among other places. She teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York with her husband and children.