Richard Garcia, Cohen Award

Cohen Awards  Each volume year, the best poem, short story, and nonfiction piece published in Ploughshares are honored with the Cohen Awards. Finalists are nominated by staff editors, and the winners are selected by our advisory editors -- comprised of current and former guest editors. Each winner receives a cash prize of $400. The awards are wholly sponsored by our patrons Denise and Mel Cohen of New Orleans. This year, for the first time, all three winners were selected from a single issue -- West Real, Spring 1992, Vol. 18 / 1 -- a testament to the literary vision of the issue's editor, Alberto Alavaro Ríos. The 1993 Cohen Awards for work published in Ploughshares Vol. 18 go to:

Richard Garcia -- for his poem "In The Year 1946" in Spring 1992, edited by Alberto Alvaro Ríos

Richard Garcia was born in 1941 in San Francisco. Half-Puerto Rican, half-Mexican, he grew up in a house without books, except for one on the meanings of dreams. "Looking back," he says, "that one book seems to have served me well." While still in high school, he had a poem published by City Lights in a Beat anthology. After publishing his first collection in 1972, however, he did not write poetry again for twelve years, until an unsolicited letter of encouragement from Octavio Paz inspired him to resume. Since then, his work has appeared widely in literary magazines such as The Kenyon Review, Parnassus, and The Gettysburg Review. He is also the author of a bilingual children's book, My Aunt Otilia's Spirits. He has received an NEA Fellowship and four California Arts Council fellowships -- three as poet-in-residence at the Long Beach Museum of Art. Garcia has lived in Colorado, Mexico, and Israel, and now makes his home in Los Angeles, where he is poet-in-residence at Childrens Hospital, through a program sponsored by the Mark Taper Foundation. The University of Pittsburgh Press has just published a new collection of his poetry, The Flying Garcias. He and his wife, poet Dinah Berland, are currently M.F.A. candidates in Warren Wilson College's Program for Writers.