Joan Silber and Scott Withiam, 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 2003 Cohen Awards for work published in Ploughshares in 2002, Volume 28, go to Joan Silber and Scott Withiam.
                                                                                                                 Shari Caroline Diamond
Joan Silber for her story "The High Road" in Fall 2002, edited by Margot Livesey.

Joan Silber grew up in Millburn, New Jersey, where her father was a dentist and her mother was a schoolteacher. At Sarah Lawrence College, Silber studied writing with Jane Cooper and Grace Paley. After she graduated, she moved to Manhattan and spent most of her twenties waitressing and working various odd jobs. Eventually she went back to school and got her M.A. at New York University, then taught at NYU.

Her first novel, Household Words, won the PEN/Hemingway Award in 1981, and was followed by In the City in 1987. She received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She moved from novels to short stories and put together a collection that was published as In My Other Life in 2000. Stories from the book appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and other magazines. She published a third novel, Lucky Us, in 2001, and a new book of stories, Ideas of Heaven, which includes "The High Road," will be released in the spring of 2004 by W.W. Norton. The story has also been selected for Prize Stories 2003: The O. Henry Awards and The Pushcart Prize XXVIII. She lives in New York City and teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College, as well as in Warren Wilson College"s M.F.A. program. She is now working on a new novel: "It started with the idea of travel, but has moved into the question of how different cultures think people should carry their emotions. Some of the book is set in Asia, where I have been traveling as much as I can in recent years."

About "The High Road," Silber says: "Before I wrote the story, I wrote another one loosely based on an incident someone had told me, in which a woman is humiliated by her dance coach. And then I wanted to give Duncan, the coach, his own story. He was even worse, more darkly scornful, in the first story. I knew that he would end up a fool for love in some way and that this devotion without reward would do him good. Gaspara Stampa, an actual Venetian poet, is the teller of the next story in this cycle. I"d heard of her because Rilke mentions her in the Duino Elegies, and when I went to find her poems, they really did seem like blues lyrics to me."
                                                                                                                 Susan Pizzolato
Scott Withiam for his poem "Walk Right In" in Spring 2002, edited by Cornelius Eady.

Scott Withiam grew up in Interlaken, a rural village in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, and graduated from SUNY Geneseo in 1975 with a B.S. in education. He wanted to study the visual arts, to be a sculptor, but says he had neither the portfolio nor the confidence to pursue that path, and so fell back on education as a livelihood. He moved to the Boston vicinity in 1976, where he worked as a public school teacher, Section 8 property manager, and newspaper reporter. He became interested in poetry while attending Lesley College in the early eighties. "I was supposed to be pursuing a graduate degree in arts in education," he says, "but decided to give up education to pursue art again. I fell in love with poetry as a cheap means of making art, no studio required. No supplies, just the discipline." He earned his M.F.A. from Vermont College in 1997, and has since taught writing and literature at Vermont College"s Adult Degree Program, the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, and Western New England College. His poems have appeared in The Beloit Poetry Journal, 5 A.M., Green Mountains Review, Field, Harvard Review, Marlboro Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Notre Dame Review, Puerto del Sol, Sonora Review, Sycamore Review, Third Coast, Ploughshares, The Sun, and elsewhere. His first book, Arson & Prophets, will be out this fall from Ashland Poetry Press. Since 1986, he has lived in Wareham, Massachusetts, with his partner, Pam, and their three children.

About "Walk Right In," he says: "Often my first impulse is to make some daily encounter or remembered snippet into a story. And I often do set it down on paper like a story, but then I don"t want it to be a story, I want it to be a poem, dammit. I don"t know how many times I"ve been told that a poem I"m working on would be better off as a story, and I"ve always fought that. The impulse for "Walk Right In" came years ago. Fresh out of college, I worked in a shelter workshop for mentally disabled adults. I overheard a claim by a tattooed man of a couple who worked there, a claim that the two of them were able to enter each other"s dreams while they slept. For a long time this image kept coming back to me. What eventually entered into the drafts of this poem was the setting. I spent a few too many hours of my youth with my father in bars. I was never comfortable in bars. Too often I saw or heard the sadness or discontent beneath all the banter and celebration. Enter the couple who enter each other"s dreams, who make us ask, "Why would anyone want to do such a thing?" And the barmaid who has the answer that everyone probably knows but is not interested in hearing."