Janet Desaulniers, Cohen Award

Cohen Awards Each volume year, we honor the best short story and poem 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 -- each of whom receives a cash prize of $600 -- are selected by our advisory editors. The 1996 Cohen Awards for work published in Ploughshares Vol. 21 go to:

Janet Desaulniers for her story " After Rosa Parks" in Winter 1995-96, edited by Tim O'Brien & Mark Strand.

Janet Desaulniers was born in 1954 in Kansas City, Missouri, and received her undergraduate degree from the University of Missouri and her M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was a teaching-writing fellow. She has taught at Northwestern University, Carthage College, the University of Missouri, and recently began work as Director of the M.F.A. in Writing program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, TriQuarterly, The North American Review, and twice before in Ploughshares, among other publications. She has received literary fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James A. Michener/Copernicus Society, and the Illinois Arts Council, along with a Pushcart Prize and a Transatlantic Review award for fiction. She lives in Evanston, Illinois, with "a man, a boy, and a Chesapeake Bay retriever."

About "After Rosa Parks," Desaulniers writes: "One afternoon, in front of a school where I was engaged as artist-in-residence, a student who had been marked for murder by a neighborhood gang was shot. Word was he had been shot five times: once in the chest, once in the neck, once in each leg, and once in the behind -- the last wound, according to my students, meant to embarrass him even after he was dead. But he wasn't dead. He was at Cook County Hospital, conscious and most likely surrounded by inquiring detectives, as a bullet that missed him had grazed a teacher and raised his story to lead on the local news.

"His fellow students wanted to talk about whether he would or could or should tell the police who shot him. All agreed he knew who did it and that he'd be killed if he told. Most thought he'd be killed even if he didn't tell, as they couldn't recall anyone in the neighborhood outliving a mark. 'He's already dead,' someone said. 'He's got no choice.' That comment enraged a young woman, who claimed the wounded student did have a choice, not a choice she'd wish on anyone, but his choice, she reminded us, the one his life had brought him. She said he'd better make up his mind fast because then, at least, when they killed him, he'd die a free man.

"That's not the story that inspired 'After Rosa Parks,' but it's a parallel story, a true one from Chicago, to stand beside it."