A new Ploughshares site is launching soon. Find out more about our new site, and what you need to do to prepare for it, before our current storefront closes at noon EST on Friday, May 24th.»

Ploughshares

Dark blue background with white text: "Spring 2024 / Poetry and Prose Edited By / Laila Lalami"
Sign up for the Ploughshares Newsletter
Blue square with the text "Subscribe"

Want More?

Get access to the complete Ploughshares archives for $15.

Light blue square with the text "Pitch the Blog"

Love The Journal?

Ploughshares publishes great writing every day.

The Spring 2024 Issue, guest-edited by Laila Lalami, features poetry and prose by Mosab Abu Toha, Nathalie Handal, January Gill O'Neil, Farah Abdessamad, Francisco Goldman, Tommy Orange, and more.

Blog

White Like Me
When you have a gun pointed at you, there’s an odd calm that washes over. Time slows and your movements become...
The Parasitism of Memory in Burnt Sugar
When an insect is taken over by a parasite, its mind succumbs to its new captor. No longer in control of itself, it...
Decoding the Silences in Corregidora
How do you narrativize silence? Prose writers often neglect their silences, inserting them as off-beats during...
Betrayal in Rainbow Rainbow
In their debut short story collection, Rainbow Rainbow, out today, Lydia Conklin examines what it’s like to inhabit a...
Language and Trauma in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
“‘Have you ever made a scene…and then put yourself inside it?’” the narrator’s mother in Ocean Vuong’s debut novel, On...
Dark blue background with light blue text inside a light blue border: “She stands with other statues and shattered friezes like the debris of some blast or the wreckage of a sunken ship."

Free Content: Farah Abdessamad

Read Farah Abdessamad's piece "Blood Antiquities, Arab Tears" from the Spring 2024 Issue of Ploughshares.

A blue square with the text: Support Us

We Need Readers Like You

Donate to support our commitment to paying writers now and in perpetuity.

Headshot of Rigoberto González, the Guest Editor of the Spring 2019 Issue.

Guest Editor Spotlight: Rigoberto González

Read prose and book recommendations by Ploughshares Spring 2019 Issue guest-editor Rigoberto González.

Light blue background with dark blue text inside a dark blue border: “people too alive / afloat in the sea of fallen / sugarcane"

From the Archives: Giovannai Rosa

Read Giovannai Rosa's "untitled sugar poem", the winner in the Poetry genre from Ploughshares' Emerging Writer's Contest in 2022.