Richard Ford is an American novelist and short story author, and writer of a series of novels featuring the character Frank Bascombe.
David Gates is an American journalist and novelist. His works have been shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
Cynthia Kadohata is a Japanese American children's writer best known for her young adult novel Kira-Kira which won the Newbery Medal in 2005. She won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature in 2013 for The Thing About Luck.
Kevin Young is an American poet and the director of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African American History and Culture since 2021. Author of 11 books and editor of eight others, Young previously served as Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. A winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as a finalist for the National Book Award for his 2003 collection Jelly Roll: A Blues, Young was Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University and curator of Emory's Raymond Danowski Poetry Library. In March 2017, Young was named poetry editor of The New Yorker.
Ploughshares is an American literary journal established in 1971 by DeWitt Henry and Peter O'Malley in The Plough and Stars, an Irish pub in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Since 1989, Ploughshares has been based at Emerson College in Boston. Ploughshares publishes issues four times a year, two of which are guest-edited by a prominent writer who explores personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles. Guest editors have been the recipients of Nobel and Pulitzer prizes, National Book Awards, MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, and numerous other honors. Ploughshares also publishes longform stories and essays, known as Ploughshares Solos, all of which are edited by the editor-in-chief, Ladette Randolph, and a literary blog, launched in 2009, which publishes critical and personal essays, interviews, and book reviews.
Sabina Murray is a Filipina-American screenwriter and novelist. She currently is a professor in the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Julie Orringer is an American novelist, short story writer, and professor. She attended Cornell University and the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She was born in Miami, Florida and now lives in Brooklyn with her husband, fellow writer Ryan Harty. She is the author of The Invisible Bridge, a New York Times bestseller, and How to Breathe Underwater, a collection of stories; her novel, The Flight Portfolio, tells the story of Varian Fry, the New York journalist who went to Marseille in 1940 to save writers and artists blacklisted by the Gestapo. The novel inspired the Netflix series Transatlantic.
Anthony Dey Hoagland was an American poet. His poetry collection, What Narcissism Means to Me (2003), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other honors included two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2000 Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, and a fellowship to the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. His poems and criticism have appeared in such publications as Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, AGNI, Threepenny Review, The Gettysburg Review, Ninth Letter, Southern Indiana Review, American Poetry Review and Harvard Review.
Ploughshares Fund is a public grantmaking foundation that supports initiatives to prevent the spread and use of nuclear weapons, and to prevent conflicts that could lead to their use. Ploughshares Fund is a 501(c)(3) foundation that pools contributions from individuals, families and foundations. Ploughshares Fund enables individual contributors to pool resources and provide support for initiatives to prevent the spread and use of nuclear weapons. With over $100 million awarded in grants since its founding in 1981, Ploughshares Fund is the largest US philanthropic foundation focused exclusively on nuclear weapons.
Jean Valentine was an American poet and the New York State Poet Laureate from 2008 to 2010. Her poetry collection, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965–2003, was awarded the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry.
Maura Stanton is an American poet, and writer.
Thomas Centolella is an American poet and educator. He has published four books of poetry and has had many poems published in periodicals including American Poetry Review. He has received awards for his poetry including those from the National Poetry Series, the American Book Award, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry and the Dorset Prize. In 2019, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Cate Marvin is an American poet.
Michael Paul Burkard is an American poet.
Leroy V. Quintana is an American poet, and Vietnam Veteran.
Colleen J. McElroy was an American poet, short story writer, editor, memoirist.
Doreen Gildroy is an American poet.
Christine Sneed is an American author — the novels Little Known Facts (2013), Paris, He Said (2015), and Please Be Advised (2022), and the story collections Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry (2010), The Virginity of Famous Men (2016), and Direct Sunlight (2023) — as well as a graduate-level fiction professor at Northwestern University who also teaches in Regis University's low-residency MFA program. She is the recipient of the Chicago Public Library Foundation's 21st Century Award, the John C. Zacharis First Book Award, the Society of Midland Authors Award, the 2009 AWP Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, and the Chicago Writers' Association Book of the Year Award in both 2011 and 2017.
Cathy Linh Che is a Vietnamese American poet from Los Angeles. She won the Kundiman Poetry prize, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies for her book Split.
Jean Thompson is an American novelist, short story writer, and teacher of creative writing. She lives in Urbana, Illinois, where she has spent much of her career, and is a professor emerita at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, having also taught at San Francisco State University, Reed College, and Northwestern University.
