BOSTON, Aug. 15, 2001(PRIMEZONE)-- Ploughshares, the nonprofit literary journal at Emerson College, has launched a major new Website, www.pshares.org.
An unprecedented resource for contemporary literature, the Website will be the most extensive for any literary journal in the country, offering free access to more than 2,750 poems and short stories from past and current issues of Ploughshares.
Headlining the site's launch is the newest issue, Fall 2001, which commemorates Ploughshares's 30th anniversary.
Supported by a $125,000 grant from the Wallace-Reader's Digest Funds, the three-year Web project involved fully indexing every title Ploughshares has ever published and digitizing more than 18,000 journal pages.
The Website has been designed as a literary portal to promote the journal's writers, making a personal Web page available for each of its 2,000--plus authors, allowing them to update biographical notes; announce news; books, and events; and create links to other sites.
Juxta Digital, whose clients include Court TV, Columbia University, and the Academy of American Poets, developed the site, with Ploughshares editor Don Lee, acting as project manager.
The Fall 2001 30th anniversary issue, guest-edited by Donald Hall, features new poems and stories by ninety writers, many of them former Ploughshares contributors and editors, including: Frank Bidart, Mark Doty, Rita Dove, Marilyn Hacker, Philip Levine, Paul Muldoon, Gerald Stern, and Ellen Bryant Voigt. In addition, Ann Beattie, Rosellen Brown, and founding editor DeWitt Henry, among others, provide reflective essays about their literary starts.
A 30th anniversary celebration will be held in late September in Boston. A review copy of the issue and a media kit are available upon request. You may preview the entire contents of the issue at: www.pshares.org/Fall2001issue.pdf. Not for public access.
Regarded as one of the best literary journals in the country, Ploughshares has had more selections in The Best American Short Stories than any other literary journal in the past ten-years (a record four out of the twenty stories in this year's edition), and nearly every year, stories, poems, and essays published in Ploughshares have also been reprinted in annuals such as The Best American Poetry, The O. Henry Awards, and The Pushcart Prize.
Ploughshares was founded in 1971 by DeWitt Henry and Peter O'Malley in the Plough and Stars, an Irish pub in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The journal is published three times a year in trade paperback, with each issue guest-edited by a different writer of prominence. This unique guest-editor policy is designed to introduce readers to different literary circles and tastes, and to offer a fuller representation of the range and diversity of contemporary letters than would be possible with a single editorship. More information about Ploughshares, including its history and its award-winning writers, may be found on the Website under at www.pshares.org.
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CONTACT: Ploughshares, Boston
Don Lee, Editor
Don_Lee@emerson.edu
(617) 824-8500