Marshall N. Klimasewiski, Cohen Award

Cohen Awards  Each volume year, we honor the best poem, short story, and essay 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 are selected by our advisory editors. Each winner receives a cash prize of $400. The 1995 Cohen Awards for work published in Ploughshares Vol. 20 go to:

Marshall N. Klimasewiski for his story "Snowfield" in the Spring 1994 issue, edited by James Welch.

Marshall N. Klimasewiski was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1966 and grew up in the rural northwest corner of the state. He received his B.A. in English literature from Carnegie Mellon University, an M.F.A. in creative writing from Bowling Green State University, and a second master's in writing from Boston University. During and between his studies, he worked as a short-order cook, an electrical technician, an office temp, and a special projects coordinator for the public television station WGBH, assisting with This Old House, The Victory Garden, and The New Yankee Workshop. He has also taught creative writing at Bowling Green State University and the University of Hartford.

In 1988, his first story publication appeared in Ploughshares. Since then, he has published stories in such magazines and journals as The New Yorker, The Antioch Review, Quarterly West, and ONTHEBUS. A story entitled "JunHee" was included in The Best American Short Stories 1992, edited by Robert Stone, and in an anthology of American fiction edited by the U.S. Information Agency for use among their English teachers abroad. This past winter, he was a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He currently lives in Seattle and hopes to return to teaching soon.

About "Snowfield," Klimasewiski writes: "Although the bulk of the story takes place during a single train ride, I originally intended that to be only the initial, brief scene of a longer story. The scene stretched out as I wrote it, and when it was almost finished, it came to seem self-sustaining and complete. But it suggested a great deal more to me, and for about six months I attempted to write a novel for which 'Snowfield' would be the first chapter. I eventually recognized that I wasn't up to the task; the historic and international settings, in 1940's New York and 1920's Poland, were particularly daunting and probably ill-conceived. But Stanley, the narrator, and both of his parents remain interesting to me, and I'll likely make another pass at them in the future. By the way, the Bergsonites were a real and fairly remarkable group of activists during the war. Their efforts are probably detailed most comprehensively by David S. Wyman in The Abandonment of the Jews."