Ploughshares

About Ploughshares

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 it has been based at Emerson College in Boston. Published quarterly, Ploughshares blends the distinct editorial perspectives of two guest-edited issues with two staff-edited issues each year, showcasing established and emerging writers in fiction, poetry and nonfiction. Guest editors have included recipients of Nobel and Pulitzer prizes, National Book Awards, and MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships. Since August 2025, Jenny Molberg has served as editor-in-chief. The Literary Magazine Review once proclaimed it a magazine that has published a good deal of what has become our significant contemporary American literature.

The journal is indexed in JSTOR and Scopus, carries the print ISSN 0048-4474, and its website is pshares.org. It receives more than eleven thousand submissions a year, roughly half poetry and half prose.

Founding in an Irish Pub

In 1971, DeWitt Henry, then a recent Ph.D. graduate from Harvard, and Peter O'Malley, the Irish expatriate co-owner of The Plough and Stars pub in Cambridge, Massachusetts, decided over pints that the world of letters needed a venue for writers outside what they considered the literary establishment. From those barstool discussions grew Ploughshares, a magazine created, in Henry's words, for common readers, especially those of their own generation who would explore the different aesthetics and passions they debated.

The founders were part of a coterie of writers who met regularly at the Plough in those early days, among them Bowery poets, White Mountain poets, Harvard graduates and Irish expatriates accustomed to the great literary bars of Ireland. What was unusual was that they took their arguments about the future of literature into the pages of a journal. From its very beginning, Ploughshares committed itself to providing a platform for as much diversity of taste as possible, hence the guest editor policy that remains its hallmark.

The Guest Editor Model

Each issue of Ploughshares is shaped by a prominent writer serving as guest editor, who explores a personal vision, aesthetic or literary circle. Guest editors directly solicit about half of their issue's contents and select the remainder from the magazine's submissions, with the staff reading every submission and winnowing them into a shortlist. Over the years guest editors have included Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, Sherman Alexie, Russell Banks, Lorrie Moore, Yusef Komunyakaa and Richard Ford.

The guest editing policy was sewn into the magazine from the beginning and is a central part of what makes its selections so vibrant and diverse. Two of the journal's issues each year are guest-edited and two are staff-edited, giving readers both the strong personality of a curated volume and the wide-ranging taste of the permanent staff.

Launching Great Careers

Ploughshares has been one of the great launching pads of American literature. Many of today's most respected writers had their first or early work published in its pages, including John Irving, Russell Banks, Sue Miller, Tim O'Brien, Robert Pinsky, Jayne Anne Phillips, Thomas Lux, Edward P. Jones and Mona Simpson. The magazine's willingness to publish unknown writers alongside established ones has made it a place where careers begin.

The forty-fifth anniversary edition, published in 2016, was co-edited by the novelist Claire Messud and her husband, the literary critic James Wood, and celebrated what Henry called forty-five years of tomorrow's classics today.

Editors Across Five Decades

DeWitt Henry edited Ploughshares from its founding in 1971 until 1995, when he handed the reins to Don Lee, a 1986 graduate of Emerson's MFA program. Under Henry the magazine grew from a local publication to a national journal, with annual circulation rising from one thousand to three thousand. Lee was succeeded by Ladette Randolph, who led the journal for many years and oversaw innovations including the Ploughshares Solos digital series.

Since August 2025, Jenny Molberg has served as editor-in-chief, the magazine's fourth editor in more than fifty years. Each editor has also taught in Emerson's Writing, Literature and Publishing department and played a public role in Boston's literary community and at writing conferences and colleges across the country.

The Move to Emerson College

In the late 1980s Ploughshares became affiliated with Emerson College, where Henry chaired the writing department, and it has remained there since 1989. Emerson hosts one of the best MFA programs in creative writing in the country, and the affiliation gave the magazine an institutional home, a large staff of volunteer readers drawn mostly from current students and recent MFA graduates, and deep roots in Boston's literary life.

The archives of Ploughshares, Inc. were obtained by Emerson College through a merger in 2008 and are now held by the Emerson College Archives in Boston, preserving the complete record of the magazine's half-century.

Ploughshares Solos

In 2012 Ploughshares launched Ploughshares Solos, a series of longer-form stories and novellas published digitally on a monthly basis and anthologized in print annually. The series was conceived to give readers substantive stories in smaller doses, for readers who might not want to read through an entire magazine of short stories but would choose to download one longer story at a time. Monthly editions launched with works available digitally through pshares.org and major ebook retailers, with submissions accepted on an ongoing basis.

The Solos series extended the magazine's mission into digital publishing while maintaining its commitment to literary quality, and it has published longer works by both emerging and established writers.

Circulation and Submissions

Ploughshares today has a circulation of about six thousand, a robust number for a literary magazine, and it receives more than eleven thousand submissions a year, roughly half poetry and half prose. Each guest editor directly solicits ninety pages for his or her issue and must choose the remaining ninety pages from submissions, a discipline that keeps the magazine open to the slush pile in a way few journals of its stature manage.

The magazine is published in quality paperback, and its issues are collected by libraries and indexed in JSTOR, where the complete run from the 1970s to the present is available to scholars.

The Magazine in the 2020s

Ploughshares enters its sixth decade with its founding model intact. The JSTOR archive documents continuous quarterly publication through Volume 51 in 2025, comprising the Winter 2025-2026, Fall 2025, Summer 2025 and Spring 2025 issues, and Volume 52 beginning with Spring 2026, each issue running to roughly two hundred pages. Since August 2025 the magazine has been led by editor-in-chief Jenny Molberg, working from its longtime home at Emerson College in Boston.

The journal continues to blend guest-edited and staff-edited issues, to draw on Emerson's MFA community for its corps of volunteer readers, and to receive more than eleven thousand submissions a year. More than fifty years after two men decided over pints in a Cambridge pub that literature needed a new venue, Ploughshares remains what DeWitt Henry hoped it would be: a magazine committed to as much diversity of taste as possible.

Recognition and Standing

Ploughshares' guest editors have been recipients of Nobel and Pulitzer prizes, National Book Awards, MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, and numerous other honors, and the magazine itself is consistently ranked among the premier literary journals in the United States. Its fiftieth anniversary in 2021 was widely noted in the literary press as a milestone for independent literary publishing.

From a conversation over pints in a Cambridge pub to a nationally distributed quarterly at the heart of one of America's leading writing programs, Ploughshares has remained true to its founding idea: that literature thrives on the clash of different aesthetics and passions, and that a magazine can be the arena where that clash takes place.