Ploughshares

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.

On October 22, 2025, we hosted contributors Juliana Lamy, Heather Thompson-Brenner, and Devon Walker-Figueroa for a reading at Trident Booksellers in celebration of our Fall Longform issue. Filming by Caleigh McCrink.

Kathryn Nuernberger: Welcome to PS! PS is Ploughshares’ tribute to our literary histories; an addendum to the print issues. PS presents contemporary dialogues in the epistolary tradition–love letters that revisit, remix, and reimagine our literary past, present, and future. Here you’ll find essays, interviews, recordings, and other multimedia ephemera in direct conversation with Ploughshares’s 50+ year archive.

The Literary Boroughs series will explore little-known and well-known literary communities across the country and world and show that while literary culture can exist online without regard to geographic location, it also continues to thrive locally. Posts are by no means exhaustive and we encourage our readers to contribute in the comment section. The series will run on our blog from May 2012 until AWP13 in Boston. Please enjoy the forty-fifth post on Columbia, Missouri, by Michael Nye.

Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama Alison Bechdel Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, May 2012 304 pages $22.00 This post was contributed by Kim Liao. As a nonfiction writer, I envy visual artists. They get a palette of colors and canvases and, as a result, a vocabulary at their disposal beyond my 26 letters. And there were moments during Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Are You My Mother?