Cleopatra Mathis, Cohen Award

Cohen Awards Each year, we honor the best poem, short story, and essay published in Ploughshares with the Cohen Awards, which are wholly sponsored by our longtime patrons Denise and Mel Cohen.Finalists are nominated by staff editors, and the winners are selected by our advisory editors. This year, we combined the fiction and nonfiction categories, since only one essay was printed in 1993; each winner receives a cash prize of $600. The 1994 Cohen Awards for work published in Ploughshares Vol. 19 go to:

Cleopatra Mathis for her poem " The Story" in Winter 1993-94, edited by Russell Banks and Chase Twichell.

Born in the small college town of Ruston, Louisiana, Cleopatra Mathis was raised by her Greek mother's family, along with several members of the black community who worked at the family's café. Mathis says that their influence -- combined with that of her grandfather, who spoke no English, and her grandmother, who ran the business -- far outweighed that of her father, who was half-Cherokee and left when Mathis was six years old.

After studying at a variety of colleges, she began teaching English in Texas and received her bachelor's degree from Southwest Texas State University in 1970. It was during seven years of public high school teaching that Mathis became interested in poetry. When she moved to New Jersey, she enrolled in a workshop at the New School for Social Research, then went to Columbia University for her M.F.A., graduating in 1978.

Her work has appeared in many magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, The New Republic, Antaeus, The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, and The Iowa Review. She has published three books of poems, Aerial View of Louisiana in 1980, The Bottom Land in 1983, and The Center for Cold Weather in 1989, all from Sheep Meadow Press. Recent anthologies with selections of her work include The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets and The Made Thing: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern Poetry. She has received a fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Robert Frost Award, an exchange fellowship to the Tyrone Guthrie Centre for the Arts in Ireland, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and the Lavin Award for Younger Poets from the Academy of American Poets. She lives with her family in Hanover, New Hampshire, where she is Professor of English and Director of the creative writing program at Dartmouth College.

Mathis writes, "Three aspects combined to make 'The Story': my fascination with the Cupid-Psyche myth, the notion that faith is intrinsic to the survival of love; my Greek grandmother's belief that the soul lives somewhere deep in the back of the head and the devil's route is through the eyes in his endless pursuit; and lastly, the event of my husband's benign brain tumor, located next to the pineal gland, which the ancients claimed housed the soul. Our neurosurgeon, a man with a Ph.D. in English literature, removed the tumor in a dangerous nine-hour operation. In that mysterious, roundabout process that writing allows, the poem is dedicated to the surgeon."