Cohen Award Winners, and More Awards
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 and staff. The 2010 Cohen Awards for work published in Ploughshares in 2009, Volume 35, go to Adrian Blevins and Andria Nacina Cole.
Adrian Blevins for her poem “The Waning” in Winter 2009-10, edited by Tony Hoagland.
Adrian Blevins was born and raised in the foot hills of the Blue Ridge Mountains where her primary ambition as a child was to simply play outdoors. She says, “I liked to play in the creek—to hang by my knees from the limbs of big trees.”
At the age of thirteen, though, she had an awakening to poetry when she met the poet Rodney Jones (a friend of her father’s). That year he took her to a couple of readings. Blevins says, “I was awestruck. It was like magic,” and goes on to describe how one of the poets who was reading, James Seay, had an eye patch. Up to that point in her life, she had never seen anything “so exotic or exciting.”
She attended a high school that sits beside the James River in Virginia. The school was so rural it closed during deer season. Not surprisingly, she had a difficult time there. After high school, she attended Virginia Intermont College, where her father taught drawing and art history. Rodney Jones was also teaching there. She started out as a fiction writer, eventually earning a Master’s in fiction from Hollins University, but, she admits, “I started writing poems the second I finished my thesis of horrible stories.”
Ten years later, Blevins attended Warren Wilson to study poetry. “Bingo is what I want to say about it, and about the whole experience there and about the brilliance and seriousness of my mentors and peers…But it took me forever to understand the genre I needed to be working in,” she says. “And it took me some time to learn how to be a good student—I went from lackluster to way overdiligent.”
Although she has taught writing her entire adult life and concedes that of course “writers have to eat just like other people,” when asked how her literary career began, Blevins has strong opinions and concerns about the “professionalism of the craft of writing…This is because I am, yes, an idealist and maybe even a little bit of a romanticist, trying to live more like Jesus every day, like my Daddy, the atheist, said quite sincerely to do. But it’s also because a focus on money—are you kidding me?!— and fame—!!!—distracts us from our deeper and nobler intentions. I mean, questions. Problems. I once heard Joyce Carol Oates joke during a TV lecture about, of all things, how young writers ‘apparently think publishing is the goal,’ and this tickled me, as, really, much, much greater problems and aims are at stake in serious art. As Dean Young, quoting Robert Motherwell, says, ‘the main thing is not to be dead.’ Meanwhile, Jorie Graham says, ‘we must be unforgettable or not at all.’ I want to say for the record that I don’t really have a ‘literary career.’ It’s more like an assignment or a charge. A duty. An infection? An addiction?”
Part of that luck is attributed to the influence of her mentors. Rodney Jones remained a mentor. At Hollins, Blevins was influenced by Eric Trethewey, and at Warren Wilson, Steve Orlen, Roger Fanning, and Tony Hoagland, “who, with Rodney, has been my most steadfast advocate.” And she admits, “I am so thankful to him for that. Tony’s help came at a time when I no longer deserved it—at a time when I’d decided everything I was going to learn from there on out I was going to have to teach myself—and was, thus, the most wondrous gift.”
As for other influences in her work, she says immediately “the greatest influence on me as a person has been my experience as a mother.”All those years she was learning to write she raised three children: Weston (24), Benjamin (21), and August (11). The writers who influenced her were, first, the southern writers: William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O’Connor. There was also Virginia Woolf, Nabokov, Philip Roth, and Saul Bellow. She felt especially the influence of the poets C. K. Williams, Gerald Stern, Larry Levis, James Wright, David Kirby, Barbara Hamby, Robert Hass, and Sharon Olds, among others.
Blevins concludes, “I know I’ve been lucky. As hard as it’s been for me—and it’s been hard in a lot of ways—I have been very, very lucky too.”
Andria Nacina Cole for her story “Leaving Women” in Spring 2009, edited by Eleanor Wilner.
Andria Nacina Cole was born in Great Lakes, Illinois. Her father was in the Navy and for the first eight years of her life, the family traveled up and down the East Coast, eventually settling in Buffalo, New York, where both her maternal and paternal families lived. Despite Buffalo’s reputation as one of the poorest cities in the country, Cole defends the city from its detractors, saying “everyone I love is there.”
Cole was already a serious dancer in the fourth grade; however, her grades were suffering in the community school and her mother fought for her to get admitted to a local performing arts school. After the audition, her mother took aside the head dance teacher to say Cole “needed the school to save my life.” At the time, Cole felt her mother was exaggerating a bit, but she later conceded the school did save her life.
She became an excellent student. Her earliest ambitions were to be a doctor, though she is now convinced she was attracted to the prestige of the profession rather than the practice of medicine. “The truth is,” she says,“I was always more creative than academic.”She continued to dance well into college and toured with a local ballet company for a while.
Cole was the valedictorian of her graduating class and entered, on a scholarship, the creative writing program at Morgan State University. Despite its small size, she met many serious and talented writers in the program. From there, she attended graduate school at Johns Hopkins, where she was convinced she had no idea what she was doing “in a single class.” And she concludes, “my life was saved for a second time by a school.”
Currently, Cole is a GED teacher, a job she considers the most fulfilling of her life to date. She also writes educational materials (science workbooks and math flash cards). The most significant push in her writing career came in the form of a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council for a draft of a novel. She went on to receive two more grants, one at the highest level. Her first story, “Such Evenings,” was published in Baltimore Urbanite.
Cole credits her mother for inspiring her to become a writer. A “master storyteller,” her mother was someone who could turn a “regular old I went to Bingo and guess what happened” story into something that could entertain and engage listeners. “If she had girlfriends over, I was in heaven,” Cole says. “Of course, I was sent out of the room because everything they were about to discuss was not for a little girl’s ears, but they were so loud and passionate I heard it all anyway. The way my mother would take a drag from her cigarette right on time and make you wait while she savored the taste…I think that taught me rhythm. My mom planted that seed—the idea that what happens to you is relevant and that if you tell it right it becomes magical.”
Other mentors include Carla DuPree and Tristan Davies in the fiction department at Johns Hopkins and Leonard Cassuto, whose class Black and White Literature in the Nineteenth Century “changed [my] writing life.” Cole’s most important literary influence is James Baldwin. Her sister tells her “it’s not natural, the way I love him,” Cole says. And then there’s Toni Morrison. “She put in me this incessant need to be excellent (something I have yet to satisfy),” she says. And Cole continues: “William Faulkner for his refusal to dumb anything down and his attempt to write black folk seriously. Zora Neale Hurston for all her fire. Gayl Jones for her rhythm and mystery and refusal to stay away from the taboo. I was deeply touched by Kathryn Harrison’s memoir, The Kiss. I am intrigued by Charles Bukowski. Flannery O’Connor (I love her at times and absolutely do not at others). Toi Derricotte for her utter and complete honesty. Lucille Clifton for teaching me just how subtle beauty is. Paule Marshall taught me not to be afraid if things get complicated—if they do, well that’s all right.”
More Awards Our congratulations to the following Ploughshares writers, whose work has been selected for these anthologies:
Best Stories
Rebecca Makkai’s “Painted Ocean, Painted Ship,” from the Winter 2009-10 issue, edited by Tony Hoagland, will be included in The Best American Short Stories 2010. The anthology is due out October 2010 from Houghton Mifflin, with Richard Russo as the guest editor and Heidi Pitlor as the series editor.
Pushcart
L. S. Asekoff ’s poem “Hither & Yon,” from the Winter 2009-10 issue, edited by Tony Hoagland, Martin Moran’s story “Analphabet,”from the Fall 2009 issue, edited by Kathryn Harrison, and Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s poem “Rome,” from the Spring 2009 issue, edited by Eleanor Wilner, have been selected for The Pushcart Prize XXXV: Best of the Small Presses, which will be published by Bill Henderson’s Pushcart Press November 2010.