The 50th Anniversary Issue. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Since 1971, Ploughshares has discovered and cultivated the freshest voices in contemporary American literature, and remains prescient in the digital age by providing readers with thoughtful and entertaining literature in a variety of formats. Find out why the New York Times named Ploughshares “the Triton among minnows.” 

Ploughshares showcases the work of “writers who make the shapes they want to make, who follow the flow of the story and who remind us of all a story or an essay can do and be,” guest editor Aimee Bender writes in her introduction to the 50th Anniversary Issue. “Here, then, are some writers who work the form to hold the complexity, a bountifully inhabited sea of prose.” Contributors to the Summer 2021 Issue of Ploughshares include Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Rumaan Alam, Patrick Cottrell, Amelia Gray, Mona Awad, and others.