Postscripts (Daisy Fried and Xu Xi, Cohen Award Winners)
Cohen Awards Each year, we honor the best poem and short story 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 2005 Cohen Awards for work published in Ploughshares in 2004, Volume 30, go to Daisy Fried and Xu Xi. (All of the works mentioned here are accessible on our website at pshares.org.)
Daisy Fried for her poem "Shooting Kinesha" in Spring 2004, edited by Campbell McGrath.
Daisy Fried was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1967. The daughter of a wildlife biologist and an early childhood education teacher—both of them also writers—she grew up in Albany, New York, and graduated with a B.A. in English from Swarthmore College in 1989. After a series of post-college slacker-type jobs in Philadelphia, she worked in the mid-nineties as a staff writer for alternative weekly newspapers, first Philadelphia Weekly, then Philadelphia City Paper. The discipline of a weekly deadline leaked into her occasional poetry writing, and poetry writing took over. Though she still occasionally freelances, she has supported herself since 1998 with a combination of poetry fellowships, grants, and part-time teaching.
She is the author of two books of poetry, My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again (forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2006) and She Didn't Mean to Do It (Pittsburgh, 2000), which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. She was a 2004–05 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, a 2002 Bread Loaf Fellow, and a 1998 Pew Fellow in poetry. The recipient of the 2001 Leeway Award for Excellence in poetry, she has taught creative writing in Warren Wilson College's low-residency M.F.A. program, at Haverford College, University of Pennsylvania, and Rutgers–New Brunswick. She is currently the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, and Philadelphia with her husband, the writer Jim Quinn, and their cat, Mister Buster. They travel as much as they can, mostly renting tiny cheap apartments in European capitals for a month or two at a time. She is working on her third book of poetry.
About "Shooting Kinesha," Fried writes: "My poems, particularly the longer narratives, accrue over time through a process of adding and sloughing, cutting and pasting, mixing together true stories and fiction, various things I'm thinking about, till all the parts seem necessary. I believe 'Shooting Kinesha' started when I was sitting with my husband at my favorite Philadelphia bar, the Standard Tap, drinking my favorite Philadelphia beer, Yards Love Stout, telling Jim something someone said to me that I thought was funny, and he said, 'That sounds like a poem.' Then all kinds of other things got in there and patterns began to emerge. I'm thirty-seven and have been to/heard about/been in a lot of weddings over the last ten years or so. People write a lot of epithalamiums, but I like the moment after the ceremony, when no one's sure what to do next, and everyone's life is pretty much going on the same, but you've still got the party to go to—hich can be fun, but also means you've got a few more hours in your painful shoes.
"I like to see how much simultaneous humor and seriousness I can get into my work. I like specific settings and people having conversations inside quotation marks. I like at least a couple of other people besides my narrator in my poems. I like a poem that goes here and there but eventually finds its way, and which (maybe) enacts the process of realizing what it's about before the reader's eyes. And I'm interested in tones that don't often get into poetry, like querulousness and anxiety. Affirmation, consolation, and healing are, to me, pretty uninteresting."
Xu Xi for her story "Famine" in Winter 2004–05, edited by Joy Harjo.
Xu Xi was born in 1954 and raised in Hong Kong. An Indonesian citizen of Chinese ancestry, she spoke English and Cantonese as native languages, though neither was her parents' mother tongue. Her father was an international trader of manganese ore, her mother a pharmacist. Xu Xi started writing and publishing stories in English as a child and never stopped.
After getting her undergraduate degree in the US at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, she went home and worked in international marketing for seven years. Her city inspired fiction, but offered little space for a writer in English. She left and flitted around Europe for a year, ending up at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she got her M.F.A. Marketing jobs followed in Cincinnati, then New York, where she became a US citizen. After eleven years in the US, she found a job that returned her to Hong Kong. The greatest influence on her writing, she says, has been Hong Kong itself, "with its hybrid national and international culture, and linguistic mix." In 1998, she left corporate life forever, and now splits her time between New York, Hong Kong, and New Zealand. She teaches fiction in Vermont College's M.F.A. program.
Her books include three novels, Chinese Walls, Hong Kong Rose, and The Unwalled City; two fiction collections, Daughters of Hui, named an Asiaweek best book, and History's Fiction; one mixed-genre volume, Overleaf Hong Kong; and two companion anthologies of Hong Kong literature in English that she co-edited, City Voices and City Stage. Her honors include a New York Arts Foundation fiction fellowship, a State University of New York distinguished alumni award, and residencies at Chateau de Lavigny, Kulturhuset USF, the Jack Kerouac Project, and the Anderson Center. She is currently writing an essay collection, Evanescent Isle: Glimpses of Hong Kong, My City Village, and a novel inspired by Sino-US relations and Bugs Bunny. For more information, visit www.xuxiwriter.com.
About "Famine," Xu Xi writes: "The story was born of an old obsession, of existence comprising an above life and under life, something that became my mantra when I first started writing fiction as a child. I wanted to merge the faces we wear in public with private longings, and push this idea to its outer limits. My longtime friend, an English teacher, was taking early retirement. She and I always met over leisurely, cuisine-centered dinners, and her anecdotes about teaching in Hong Kong schools informed my protagonist. The Plaza Hotel intruded because a traveler must arrive somewhere. And famine was China's horror under Mao, a historical truth worth remembering."
MORE AWARDS Our congratulations to the following writers, whose work has been selected for these anthologies:
BEST POETRY Beth Ann Fennelly's poem "I Need to Be More French. Or Japanese.," from the Spring 2004 issue edited by Campbell McGrath, will appear in The Best American Poetry 2005 this September from Scribner, with Paul Muldoon as the guest editor and David Lehman as the series editor.
PUSHCART Daisy Fried's poem "Shooting Kinesha" and Cynthia Weiner's story "Boyfriends," from the Spring 2004 issue, have been selected for The Pushcart Prize XXX: Best of the Small Presses, which will be published by Bill Henderson's Pushcart Press this fall.
O. HENRY Xu Xi's "Famine" has been chosen for The O. Henry Prize Stories 2006 by editor Laura Furman. The anthology will be published next May by Anchor Books.