Ron Carlson, 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:

Ron Carlson -- for his story "Blazo."

Ron Carlson was born in Logan, Utah. In 1971, after finishing his master's degree in English at the University of Utah, he ventured east to teach, coach, and run a dormitory at the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut. There, while teaching classes six days a week and learning to skate so he could properly coach one of the hockey teams, Carlson began his first novel, Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which was published in 1977. After his second novel, Truants, was released in 1981, he returned to Utah for a life of writing and periodic teaching engagements sponsored by the arts councils of Utah, Idaho, and Alaska. In 1986, Carlson accepted a teaching post at Arizona State University, where he is now the Director of the Creative Writing Program. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Gentlemen's Quarterly, Playboy, Best American Short Stories, Sudden Fiction, Best of the West, and many other magazines and anthologies. A recipient of an NEA Fellowship, he is the author of the collections The News of the World and Plan B for the Middle Class, which was published last year by W.W. Norton & Co. He will be co-hosting Books and Company next spring on KAET Public Television. He lives with his wife, Elaine, and their two sons in Tempe, Arizona.