Postscripts (Laura Kasischke and R. T. Smith, Cohen Award Winners)

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 2006 Cohen Awards for work published in Ploughshares in 2005, Volume 31, go to Laura Kasischke and R. T. Smith. (All of the works mentioned here are accessible on our website at pshares.org.)

Laura Kasischke for her story "If a Stranger Approaches You about Carrying a Foreign Object with You onto the Plane . . ." in Fall 2005, edited by Antonya Nelson.

Laura Kasischke was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, in 1961, but raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her father was in the Air Force and later worked as a mailman. She was an only child, which probably had something to do, she says, with her interest in writing: "I was bored. Reading, writing, and watching television were good time-killers in Grand Rapids, where other distractions were hard to come by. By the time I was in high school, I was hooked on reading and writing, probably because we didn't have cable television. I had a wonderful high-school creative-writing teacher with whom I was secretly, madly in love, and who had once been engaged to my mother. Mr. Brenner. I was only subconsciously aware of his past relationship with my mother until my devotion to him must have alarmed her, and she revealed it one day, many years into my tutelage, just before dinner. I still remember standing at the refrigerator when she told me, and the way the layers of secrecy, the hidden lives of the people around me and their agendas, the subtexts and shadows and incestuous estuaries, the awesome significance of little gestures and half-spoken truths, became immediately fused with the act of writing for me. It's never left. When I write now, I'm still sort of standing at the fridge suddenly realizing how complex everything is if you can just figure out the whole story."

After high school, Kasischke went to the University of Michigan and studied creative writing, both as an undergraduate and graduate student. She is now an assistant professor there, in the Residential College and the M.F.A. program in creative writing. She has published six collections of poetry, most recently Gardening in the Dark (Ausable, 2004); three novels; and a novel for young adults. A new novel, Be Mine, will be published in January 2007 by Harcourt. She has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and several Pushcart Prizes, and her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Harper's, and The New Republic. She lives with her ten-year-old son and her husband in Chelsea, Michigan.

About "If a Stranger Approaches You about Carrying a Foreign Object with You onto the Plane . . . ," Laura Kasischke writes: "I started this story in a notebook, while stuck at the airport, after the tenth or eleventh PA announcement warning me about strangers approaching me about carrying foreign objects with me onto the plane. I was trying to imagine under what circumstances a stranger would make such a request, and under what circumstances one would consider honoring such a request—while, like everyone else in the airport, the influences of culture and personality, history and the human condition, were exerted in sweet and sinister ways upon me."

R. T. Smith for his poem "Dar He" in Spring 2005, edited by Martín Espada.

R. T. (Rod) Smith was born in Washington, D.C., in 1947 and raised in Georgia and North Carolina. His father was an arson investigator and security specialist, and his mother was a beautician and secretary. Smith attended Georgia Tech and received a B.A. in philosophy from UNCC and an M.A. in English from Appalachian State University. He began his writing career in his mid-twenties "under the spell of Dickey, Warren, Faulkner, O'Connor, Welty, and, less predictably, Merwin and Roethke." Smith began writing at Appalachian State, but says, "since there were no graduate classes in creative writing, I had to rely on a small cadre of friends for feedback. Thank God they were tolerant, merciful, and astute." For nineteen years he was an English professor and writer-in-residence at Auburn University, where he co-edited Southern Humanities Review and caught, he says, a lot of bass. Since 1995 he has edited Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee University Review.

Smith's dozen collections of poetry include Messenger (LSU, 2001), which received the Library of Virginia Prize in Poetry, and The Hollow Log Lounge (Illinois, 2003), which received the Maurice English Award. He has also received three Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the NEA, the Alabama Arts Council, and the Virginia Commission for the Arts. His new book of short stories, Uke Rivers Delivers, was published in 2006 by LSU, and his next collection of poems will be published in 2007 by Arkansas. He is currently working on a prose narrative which he "thinks will be a novel" about a sheriff in the Virginia mountains during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. "It's about temptation, transgression, pursuit, and revenge—pretty much the daily business of life." He lives in Rockbridge County, Virginia, with his wife, the poet Sarah Kennedy.

About "Dar He," R. T. Smith writes: "I guess it's a poem about a guilt—collective, tribal—which you can't be forgiven for because you're not the perpetrator so much as the beneficiary in twisted and torturing ways. I started the poem one summer Sunday when the slow mangling of justice in the Emmett Till case was in the news again. I had long known many of the details in the case, and because some of the racism in my family has been unrepentant, the murders of Till and other innocents have never seemed very distant. The boy in the poem is not quite me, but he's fashioned of fragments of my memory, as well as imagination and my worst fears. The haunted nature of the narrator and his sense of Biblical judgment or impending retribution are not fictions, and rereading some of the old articles about the case that evening would have been self-destructive if I hadn't had the option of trying to work it into a poem to push the sense of shame back toward the shadows. When I went outside that night and heard the cicadas, I felt as if I knew for the first time what they were saying, and it chilled me to the spine."

MORE AWARDS Our congratulations to the following writers, whose work has been selected for these anthologies:

BEST STORIES Katherine Bell's "The Casual Car Pool," from the Fall 2005 issue edited by Antonya Nelson, and Maxine Swann's "Secret," from the Winter 2005–06 issue edited by David St. John, will be included in The Best American Short Stories 2006. The anthology is due out this October from Houghton Mifflin, with Ann Patchett as the guest editor and Katrina Kenison as the series editor.

PUSHCARTS Karen E. Bender's story "Refund" and R. T. Smith's "Dar He," from the Spring 2005 issue edited by Martín Espada, and Laura Kasischke's "If a Stranger Approaches You about Carrying a Foreign Object with You onto the Plane . . . ," from the Fall 2005 issue, have been selected for The Pushcart Prize XXXI: Best of the Small Presses, which will be published by Bill Henderson's Pushcart Press this November.