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Ploughshares Toasts its 30th Birthday with Party, New Website
A window in the Little Building Arcade features a display about the Emerson-based Ploughshares literary magazine.
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Late last month one of the country’s most prestigious literary magazines, Ploughshares, gathered its friends and former contributors and editors for an evening celebration that was 30 years in the making. About 75 guests came to the Vault at 216 Tremont St. to fete the powerhouse publication. Emerson College is Ploughshares’ institutional host.
According to the magazine’s editor, Don Lee, the guest list for the event included writers and poets who have guest-edited an edition of the magazine or who have contributed to its pages over the years. Those attending included founding editor and Emerson Associate Professor DeWitt Henry, Pulitzer Prize Winner James Alan McPherson, Emerson Poet-in-Residence Gail Mazur, former Ploughshares Managing Editor Joyce Peseroff, novelist Sue Miller (who delivered the graduate commencement address at Emerson last May), and novelist and nonfiction writer Jay Neugeboren, whose work appears in more than 50 anthologies, including Best American Short Stories. Also attending were Emerson President Jacqueline Liebergott, Vice President for Administration and Finance Robert Silverman and Library Director Mickey Zemon.
Ploughshares has more than just a birthday to celebrate this year. The magazine recently launched a new Website (www.pshares.org) that will serve as an unprecedented resource for contemporary literature. The most extensive Web resource of any literary journal in the country, the site offers free access to more than 2,750 poems and short stories from past and current issues of Ploughshares.
In addition, Ploughshares recently released a 30th-anniversary issue, guest-edited by Donald Hall, which features new poems and stories by 90 writers, many of them former Ploughshares contributors and editors. These include Frank Bidart, Mark Doty, Rita Dove, Marilyn Hacker, Philip Levine, Paul Muldoon, Gerald Stern and Ellen Bryant Voigt. In addition, Ann Beattie, Rosellen Brown, and founding editor Henry, among others, provide reflective essays about their literary starts.
While on campus, party guests also had the opportunity to view a new visual tribute to the magazine – a specially designed exhibit set in one of the historic Little Building’s arcade windows. The exhibit includes a photographic overview of the magazine’s past and present, and the people behind it. Emerson professors and Ploughshares contributors who are highlighted in the exhibit include Associate Professor Bill Knott, adjunct professor Sam Cornish (author of the memoir 1935, the first book published by Ploughshares Books), former Writer-in-Residence Dan Wakefield, Professor Emeritus of Writing, Literature and Publishing James Randall, and poet Mazur.
The exhibit curator is Robert Fleming, Emerson College archivist, and the exhibit design and installation was done by Leland DeSavage of ArtOne.
Regarded as one of the best literary journals in the country, Ploughshares has had more selections in The Best American Short Stories than any other literary journal in the past 10 years (a record 4 out of 20 this year), and nearly every year, stories, poems, and essays published in Ploughshares have also been reprinted in annuals such as The Best American Poetry, The O. Henry Awards and The Pushcart Prize.
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