Debra Spark, Cohen Award

Cohen Awards  Each volume year, the best poem, short story, and nonfiction piece published in Ploughshares are honored with the Cohen Awards. Finalists are nominated by staff editors, and the winners are selected by our advisory editors -- comprised of current and former guest editors. Each winner receives a cash prize of $400. The awards are wholly sponsored by our patrons Denise and Mel Cohen of New Orleans. This year, for the first time, all three winners were selected from a single issue- West Real, Spring 1992, Vol. 18 / 1-a testament to the literary vision of the issue's editor, Alberto Alavaro Ríos. The 1993 Cohen Awards for work published in Ploughshares Vol. 18 go to:

Debra Spark -- for her essay "The Lure of the West." Debra Spark was born and raised in a suburb of Boston. She grew up in a family of professionals -- lawyers, doctors, professors -- with artistic inclinations: one writes, another is a stand-up comic, and another is an opera singer. After graduating from Yale University in 1984 with a degree in philosophy, Spark attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she received her M.F.A. Her stories have appeared in Esquire, Prairie Schooner, New Letters, and other magazines, and she writes book reviews regularly for such publications as The Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and Hungry Mind. She also edited the anthology Twenty Under Thirty, which was published by Scribners in 1986 . Spark has worked as a management consultant, a freelance editor, and a teacher at Emerson College, Tufts University, and elsewhere. In 1992, she received an NEA Fellowship, and she was a 1992-93 Bunting Institute Fellow at Radcliffe College. Currently, she is finishing a novel about a family in Puerto Rico. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.