Ploughshares

Ploughshares is pleased to share a sneak peek of Tommy Orange’s introduction to this year’s Best Short Stories: The O. Henry Prize Winners anthology, which publishes September 29, 2026. The anthology, edited by Orange, features new work by former guest editor Colm Tóibín, and past contributors Jenny Xie, Weike Wang, and Kevin Wilson. Writing fiction for me started with the short story.

In this interview, Editor-in-chief Jenny Molberg speaks with former Ploughshares Poetry Editor and Interim Editor-in-chief John Skoyles about balancing editing and writing, championing emerging writers, and navigating the challenges of writing from personal experience. The conversation concludes with a reading of one of Skoyles’s poems. Since 2007, John Skoyles served as Ploughshares’ Poetry Editor until February 2025, when he took over as Interim Editor-in-chief before retiring later that year.

The academy often advocates for historically canonical poets—poetic landmarks of sorts, like Eliot, Pound, or Milton—but queer writers have been known to build their own landmarks. In contemporary poetry, for example, Jericho Brown’s Duplex subverts traditional received forms like the pantoum and the sonnet, which, in his words, builds “a gesture towards home.” Other poets might blend traditional meter with a narrative arc, as in Maggie Millner’s debut collection Couplets.

Kelli Russell Agodon is a bi/queer poet and editor from the Pacific Northwest. Her next book, Accidental Devotions, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in 2026. Her book Dialogues with Rising Tides (Copper Canyon Press, 2021) was a finalist in the Washington State Book Awards and shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Book Award Grand Prize in Poetry. She cofounded Two Sylvias Press and teaches at Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program.

This interview was held over Zoom on March 12, 2026. Hayley Pisciotti: Carmen, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. We’re absolutely thrilled to have you guest-editing our Summer 2027 issue, which is opening for submissions this June. For a little bit of background about PS: our mission is to place our archive in conversation with current writers and ongoing literary dialogues.

Gabrielle Bates is the author of Judas Goat (Tin House, 2023), an NPR Best Book of 2023, New York Times Book Review Critic’s Pick, and finalist for the Washington State Book Award.

Ploughshares is excited to announce our new partnership with The Unsung Masters Series. The Unsung Masters Series, supported by The University of Houston, Gulf Coast, Copper Nickel, and Pleiades, publishes and distributes one book a year that showcases an important writer who has been unjustly neglected and/or whose work is currently out of print. Each volume combines a generous selection of creative work with rigorous critical response from contemporary writers and critics.

I went to the Divinity School because I have no faith. I didn’t lose it. I never had it. I don’t believe in politics or in religion, in God or angels. I don’t believe in families or in friendship. I don’t believe in unconditional love. I don’t believe in love at all. That is, as a person. As a writer, however, I believe in everything. I am a divided self, and if my disassociation began in trauma, it has been lived out in reading and writing, most especially in writing.

In January 2026, we hosted Bridget Lowe, Shara McCallum, Maggie Dietz, and Alice Hoffman for a reading at Trident Booksellers in celebration of our Winter 2025-26 issue launch. Filming and editing by Addison Lamaute.

“You are too nice,” Kathryn Harrison once said to me. Or perhaps what she said was, “You are very nice!” but to me it sounded like the same thing. I admired and admire Kathryn. She is an astonishing writer and an astonishing soul. Several years ago, she guest-edited an issue of Ploughshares, and she devoted it entirely to the personal essay. No fiction, no poetry. She framed her intro to all this nonfiction with two images, both startling.