About

Comments? Questions? Contact us at pshares.blog@gmail.com

A Message from Ploughshares‘ Editor

Dear Reader:

Welcome to the new and improved Ploughshares blog. It’s our hope this will be a meeting place for the community of readers and writers who together comprise the Ploughshares family. I’ll be posting here from time to time to answer questions from you about what happens behind the scenes with our issues.

For now, though, a little about our history: Ploughshares was started in a Cambridge pub, The Plough and Stars. The pub was relatively new in 1971 when a group of regulars met there: Irish expatriates, Harvard graduate students, Iowa Workshop refugees, New York School and Bowery veterans, and experimental Black Mountain poets. They argued passionately about the art, politics, and literature of the day. The one thing they agreed upon was how much they couldn’t agree.

And then they did a very unusual thing. They decided to start a journal together. Their concept was to create a platform where they could each share their passions with a larger audience. And what better name than Ploughshares–the sharp edge of the plough. The connotations of the word “ploughshares” embodied–then and now–everything the founders hoped for the magazine: grassroots dedication, reform, idealism, and collaboration.

I hope you’ll come to our blog often and that you’ll add your voice to the discussion about the future of literature that began at The Plough all those years ago.

Ladette Randolph
Editor/Director
Ploughshares