Judith Grossman and Jonah Winter, Cohen Awards

Cohen Awards Each 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 2000 Cohen Awards for work published in Ploughshares in 1999, Volume 25, go to Judith Grossman and Jonah Winter. (Both of their works are accessible on our Web site at pshares.org.)

Judith Grossman for her story "How Aliens Think" in the Spring 1999 issue, edited by Mark Doty.

Judith Grossman was born in southeast London, England, just before World War II. Her parents were office workers, though her father was away on the Burma frontier from 1942-46. After attending local state schools, she went to Somerville College, Oxford, on scholarship. In 1961, Grossman came to Brandeis University and studied American literature with Philip Rahv. "But to Rahv's dismay," she says, "I did my doctoral thesis on Chaucer."

Before moving to America, Grossman wrote and published poetry; but the gift became lost in translation. In her mid-thirties she turned to fiction while teaching college courses and raising three children with her partner, the poet Allen Grossman. She has had no writing teachers, as such; instead, a lifetime of reading. "The disadvantage of this route was that everything took longer," she says. "Also, you can't get a recommendation letter from Virginia Woolf."

Her first novel, Her Own Terms, came out from Soho Press in 1988; her collection of short fiction, with "How Aliens Think" as the title story, was published in the fall of 1999 by Johns Hopkins University Press. She's now working on a novel designed to be a "last remake" of the story of Tristan and Iseult, and is also doing a nonfiction piece on short walks. Grossman has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Cummington Community for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. The Cohen Award is her first literary prize.

About "How Aliens Think," Grossman writes: "The title came first: I wanted to do a twist on anthropologist Levy-Bruhl's arrogant title How Natives Think, because my stories were working angles on cultural and sexual difference. Then I was teaching in Iowa for a semester in 1997, living alone in this house owned by artists, full of remarkable paintings, strange objects, and jungly plants. All I've known about estrangement surfaced there, but not as painful disorientation so much as a floating, carnivalesque hilarity. I wrote the first draft sitting under a painting clearly influenced by James Ensor, whose huge Entry of Christ into Brussels I saw at the Getty Museum in L.A. the year before. To be candid, I'd only known about the artist from the song "Meet James Ensor" by They Might Be Giants. A good example of how making sense of the world is still for me a fugitive thing: I must really credit this group as enabling the mood of the story. It was finished a year later, when the remembered old Jewish joke fell into place."

Jonah Winter for his poem "Sestina: Bob" in the Spring 1999 issue, edited by Mark Doty.

Jonah Winter was born in 1962 in a white frame house in Fort Worth, Texas, and raised there, he claims, "by atheist wolves." "Being sensitive-artist wolves, too," he says, "my parents played Brahms above my cradle and encouraged much sensitivity, as evidenced by (a) my early tendency to sob uncontrollably over unrequited love, and (b) a premature urge to write primitive-outsider poems about leaves by the age of five, which I published in an adult magazine by the age of seven. This led to an unfortunate string of events that included going to graduate school in creative writing twice, at the University of Virginia (where I got an M.F.A.) and at the University of New Hampshire (where I got a broken arm), then becoming a llama rancher, a flower deliverer, a children's book editor, a bum, and a chronically depressed person, which in turn prompted various geographical relocations to Idaho, San Francisco, Ohio, Maine, and New York, my current home. Apartment total: twenty-three." In recent years, Winter has supported himself through writing and illustrating children's books ( Diego, Knopf; FAIR BALL!, Scholastic; Once Upon a Time in Chicago, Hyperion) and playing various musical instruments in the band Ed's Redeeming Qualities, whose most recent CD is called At the Fish and Game Club.

Though Winter's poems have been published extensively in journals, they await book publication "with much frustration, anxiety, and muffled enthusiasm, peering out from the inside of my filing cabinet furtively, like absent-minded squirrels on an ice skating rink." His unpublished manuscripts include Postcards from Paradise, Missing Panels from an Altarpiece, Amnesia, Description of the Universe, and Here Comes Kelby!

About the poem "Sestina: Bob," for which he has also won a Pushcart Prize, Winter writes: "It derived its inspiration from a variety of sources. That a poet could, as I finally did, modify the task of writing one of the most complex, convoluted, prone-to-failure verse forms by simply reducing the six-repeated-end-words constraint to just one end-word repeated forty-two times-well, this seemed utterly ridiculous! It was so ridiculous, in fact, that it seemed like it just . . . might . . . WORK! Well, to quote Catullus, 'If a fool proceeds in his folly, he shall become wise.' Well, to quote Marlon Brando when asked in The Wild One what he was rebelling against: 'What do you got?' Well, to quote the airport limo driver from Philadelphia in belated response to a passenger who twenty minutes earlier had said, 'You just drive 'em': 'I just drive 'em!' "