Julie Orringer and Caroline Finkelstein, 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 2002 Cohen Awards for work published in Ploughshares in 2001, Volume 27, go to Julie Orringer and Caroline Finkelstein.
Julie Orringer for her story "Pilgrims" in Spring 2001, edited by Heather McHugh.
Julie Orringer was born in 1973 in Miami, Florida, while her parents were in medical school. She spent most of her childhood years in New Orleans and Ann Arbor, reading and writing plays and stories and making up games with her younger brother and sister. She went to Cornell University, where she majored in child development before deciding not to follow her parents into the medical profession. After graduating with a degree in English, she entered the M.F.A. program at the University of Iowa, and studied with Marilynne Robinson, Frank Conroy, James Alan McPherson, and Thom Jones.
photo by Ryan Harty
Upon graduation in 1996, Orringer moved to San Francisco, and over the next three years worked as a receptionist in a fertility clinic, a copy clerk in the Parc 55 Hotel, a sample-picker in a fabric warehouse, and a high-tech management consultant. In 1997 her short story "What We Save" was accepted for publication at The Yale Review, and went on to win the journal's Smart Family Foundation Award for best story of the year. Her next published story, "When She Is Old and I Am Famous," won the 1998 Paris Review Discovery Prize and was reprinted in The Pushcart Prize XXV. In 1999, Orringer was awarded a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, where she worked with John L'Heureux, Elizabeth Tallent, and Tobias Wolff. In 2001 she received the San Francisco Foundation's Joseph Henry Jackson Award for the manuscript of her short story collection, How to Breathe Underwater. "Pilgrims" has also been selected for Best New American Voices 2001, New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 2002, and The Pushcart Prize XXVII. Orringer is currently the Marsh McCall Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, the writer Ryan Harty, and is working on her first novel.
About the story, Orringer writes: "When I was eleven, almost a year after my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, we attended a macrobiotic Thanksgiving feast at the home of some friends in New Orleans. The mother of the host family had died of cancer not long before, and the daughter, a girl close to my own age, showed me a glass of red water and insisted that it contained her mother's essence. That image remained with me ever since, and fifteen years later it became the inspiration for 'Pilgrims.' As I wrote the story I found myself remembering the strange foods we ate, the vast, rickety tree house outside, and the general sense of disconnection between the sick parents and their bewildered, frightened children. My own mother died when I was twenty. Eight years later I continue to be surprised by how fresh that loss feels and how much I wish I could know her as an adult."
Caroline Finkelstein for her poem "Conjecture Number One Thousand" in Fall 2001, edited by Donald Hall.
Caroline Finkelstein was born in New York City. Her parents arrived at Ellis Island as small children, and her father worked mainly in the garment trade. As a girl, Finkelstein led what she calls "a bifurcated life, half American, half some idea of upper bourgeois European society." She remembers swinging her roller skates into the hallway closet of her parents' apartment while looking into a proto-Viennese living room. "This upbringing maintains itself in many of my poems as mood, or attitude, or actual subject matter," she says.
She was married at nineteen and had three children before she went to Goddard College's M.F.A. program in writing, where she studied with Ellen Bryant Voigt, Robert Hass, and Michael Ryan.
She has published three books, Windows Facing East, Germany, and Justice, and has finished a fourth book, The Moment. She has won two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Vermont Arts Council. In 1999, she lived in Florence, Italy, on an Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship, and then stayed in the country another year, studying Italian Renaissance art. She has published her poems in many periodicals and anthologies, including Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Fence, New American Writing, and The American Poetry Review. "Like most other poets," she says, "I suffer when I'm without a muse and feel happy and savvy when ideas for poems arrive. Much as I have tried to will the latter state, I cannot." She currently lives in Westport, Massachusetts.
About the poem, she writes: "I wrote 'Conjecture Number One Thousand' while I was a fellow at the MacDowell Colony. It's a rueful comment on my second marriage and an attempt at checking the longing that lives in my memories. The irony and occasional flippancy replicate much of the marriage's shape. Being at MacDowell, where my former husband and I had once attended, only heightened the senses of loss and comedy within that loss."