Dan Wakefield, Cohen Award
The 1992 Denise and Mel Cohen Awards
for the outstanding poem, short story, and nonfiction published in Ploughshares Volume 17
Each of these awards carries a prize of $400 and is made possible through the generosity of Denise and Mel Cohen of New Orleans. The Cohen Awards are nominated and judged by the advisory and staff editors of Ploughshares.
Best Nonfiction:
"Lion: A Memoir of Mark Van Doren"
Vol. 17/2&3, edited by DeWitt Henry and Joyce Peseroff
Dan Wakefield was born and grew up in Indianapolis, where he achieved the rank of Eagle Scout and wrote a sports column for his high school newspaper, The Shortridge Daily Echo. He fled to New York City via Columbia College, and took up residence in Greenwich Village, writing for The Nation, Dissent, and Esquire, and publishing his first book, Island in the City: The World of Spanish Harlem. Since then, he has written his novels in Boston, from Going All the Way and Starting Over to Selling Out, based on a perilous side trip to Hollywood, when he created the NBC series James at 15. His book Returning: A Spiritual Journey began with an article in The New York Times Magazine, and led to writing workshops in "spiritual autobiography," which he conducts throughout the country, in addition to teaching a course in the novel at Emerson College. He incorporated his memoir on Mark Van Doren into his latest book, New York in the Fifties (Seymour Lawrence/Houghton Mifflin).