All of us at Ploughshares congratulate Laura Didyk (@lauralud), winner of our Twitter Contest.

On May 14 we reminded you to vote for your favorite piece from the Spring 2010 issue, edited by Elizabeth Strout. And the votes are in!

He couldn't wait to finish a film before

he started the next, forty-three total plus

the nine-hundred-thiry-minute TV series;

refused to commit to any one lover

Every year, hundreds of small presses and literary journals nominate poetry and prose to the Pushcart Prize, one of the most respected literary projects in America. Ploughshares is pleased to announce our contributors L.S. Asekoff, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, and Martin Moran are winners of the 2011 Pushcart Prize. Their work will be reprinted in Pushcart Prize XXXV: Best of the Small Presses this November.

After the jump, you'll find biographies of Asekoff, Kelly, and Moran, as well as excerpts from their prize-winning work.

Each year, we honor the best poem and short story published in Ploughshares with the Cohen Awards, wholly sponsored by our longtime patrons Denise and Mel Cohen. The winners, selected by our advisory editors and staff readers, each receive a cash prize of $600. The 2010 Cohen Awards for work published in Ploughshares in 2009, Volume 35, go to Adrian Blevins and Andria Nacina Cole.

The award will be announced officially in the Fall 2010 issue guest-edited by Jim Shepard. Until then, here's a look at our winners:

Adrian Blevins's Live from the Homesick Jamboree was released by Wesleyan this fall. The Brass Girl Brouhaha (Ausable Press, 2003) won the 2004 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Blevins is also the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writer's Foundation Award, a Bright Hill Press Chapbook Award for The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes, and the Lamar York Prize for Nonfiction. She teaches at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.

An excerpt from her Cohen Award-winning poem "The Waning," first published in the Winter 2009-10 issue edited by Tony Hoagland:

When you're sixteen with pristine nipples it's hard to imagine
     you'll go a little bit blind one morning years later trying to read a bottle

Andria Nacina Cole has published short stories in Urbanite, Sensations Magazine, and Fiction Circus, among others. She is the recipient of grants from Maryland State Arts Council and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She is the founder of the Flanked Women's Writers Conference.

An excerpt from her Cohen Award-winning story "Leaving Women," first published in the Spring 2009 issue edited by Eleanor Wilner:

Now Tommy, handsome as he was, was barely the shade of an almond. And Trecie, if you blinked, might not qualify for a color at all - she was so fair the trail left by her veins could be followed across her forehead. A child of theirs might've been a peanut color, might've even managed a honey-brown, but the two most certainly could not have produced Dee's almost-purple hue. And Dee, with all her flaws and all her youth, was no fool. She could read two, three chapter books in a day, this girl. Was a magician with numbers - they folded in her hands and became soft slits of easy.

As we wrap four great months with Tony Hoagland and company, we'll leave you with this review in New Pages of the Winter 2009-10 issue of Ploughshares.

Angela Sweeney praises Hoagland for "choosing to pair works of transcendentalism and realism in such a way that brings out the best of both. Each piece varies in style from the previous one, serving to continually cleanse the palate and keep each work fresh."

She pulls out three pieces that spoke to this effect: Christian Barter's "Heisenberg," which she calls "one of the more thoughtful poems of the issue"; David Stuart MacLean's "The Answer to the Riddle is Me," fusing memory with identity; and Adrian Blevins' "The Waning," a "vivid" reflection on the aging process.

"Hoagland organizes the issue in a way that keeps the mind alive from cover to cover," Sweeney concludes her review. Read the whole article here.

First published in Ploughshares, Rebecca Makkai's story "Painted Ocean, Painted Ship" has been chosen for The Best American Short Stories 2010 by editor Richard Russo. The story was originally selected by Tony Hoagland for the Winter 2009-10 issue of Ploughshares. Click here to read "Painted Ocean, Painted Ship" online.

This marks Makkai's third inclusion in three years in the Best American Short Stories series, following the publication of her stories "The Briefcase" (2009, ed. Alice Sebold) and "The Worst You Ever Feel" (2008, ed. Salman Rushdie). Both are available to read at her website.

Founded by Edward J. O'Brien in 1915, The Best American Short Stories has gathered a rich tradition of literary voices for nearly a century. Each volume's editor culls around twenty stories from the year's best fiction and nonfiction. (We've heard Makkai will join the likes of Joshua Ferris in the 2010 BASS.)

Heidi Pitlor, in her fourth year as series editor for The Best American Short Stories, is a Ploughshares author herself. Her fiction appeared in the Winter 2000-01 issue of Ploughshares, edited by Sherman Alexie. Pitlor received her MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College, and worked as a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin. Her first novel, The Birthdays, was published in 2006 by W.W. Norton.

In a recent interview with the Barnes & Noble Review, Richard Russo spoke highly of the periodicals he read for Best American Short Stories. "It's been thrilling indeed to submerge myself in the kinds of magazines where talented younger writers are finding their first significant successes," he said. In 2009, Russo published his seventh novel, That Old Cape Magic, praised by The Washington Post as "a dyspeptic romantic comedy." He earned the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2002 for his novel Empire Falls.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will publish its newest edition of The Best American Short Stories 2010 in October 2010.

Quiero hacer contigo
lo que la primavera hace con los cerezos.

(I want
To do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.)

In case you haven't heard, Ploughshares is running a special Valentine's Day contest, "Roses Are Read." One lucky bibliophile will receive a complimentary year-long subscription. That's three free Ploughshares, starting with our Spring 2010 issue (guest edited by Elizabeth Strout).

The rules: Select one quote that speaks to the nature of love from the whole of literature. Fiction, poetry, plays, correspondence: they're all up for grabs. Identify the work if you can. Don't paste entire poems, please--and don't submit what others have. We want words whimsical and wondrous; odes amorous and adoring. Post them on our Facebook event page or tag them on Twitter (#psharesroses).

The contest ends at the stroke of midnight on Valentine's Day. We'll select our winner next Monday, February 15.

Entries we've enjoyed after the jump:

Donald Hall (a two-time Ploughshares guest-editor) and Jim Shepard (who is in the process of guest-editing the upcoming Fall 2010 issue) are up for rent!

826 Boston, a non-profit tutoring and writing center for students ages 6-18, is renting nationally-acclaimed authors for a private evening with book clubs or small groups, by raising $1,000 to benefit their free writing programs. Tom Perrotta and Julia Glass are also putting themselves on the market to benefit 826.

826 is a national literacy program, with chapters in San Francisco, New York City, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Seattle, Chicago, Los Angeles and Boston. Its mission is based on the understanding that great leaps in learning can happen with one-on-one attention, and that strong writing skills are fundamental to future success. Each 826 chapter provides drop-in tutoring, class field trips, writing workshops, and in-schools programs--all free of charge. 826 Valencia (San Francisco) was founded in 2002 by Dave Eggers, Vendela Vida, and educator Nínive Clements Calegari.

For more information about the Rent An Author Program, visit 826 Boston's website. Or, visit the website of the chapter nearest you to see how you can get involved!

Ploughshares is proud to announce that the Winter 2009/2010 issue, guest-edited by Tony Hoagland, will be available for purchase on December 15, 2009. The issue, which includes work from writers such as Mark Halliday, Nic Pizzolatto, and Rebecca Makkai, showcases Hoagland's taste, and, as always, the Ploughshares aesthetic.

In his introduction to the issue, Hoagland writes"So this issue of the noble Ploughshares, (whose name derives from its own countercultural game plan,) is full of scrutinizers, varnish-strippers, biters and scratchers, tantrum throwers, Missouri mules, and writers of exposé. You will find here a high percentage of aggression and hooting."

Ladette Randolph, Ploughshares' Editor-in-Chief, adds, "As you would expect, if you know Tony's work, his issue is lively, humorous, and touching."

The Winter 2009/2010 issue is available for purchase here.

Tony Hoagland won the 2005 Mark Twain Award from the Poetry Foundation for humor in American poetry. His books of poems include What Narcissism Means to Me and Hard Rain. He's also the author of Real Sofitikashun, a book of essays on craft (2006). He teaches at the University of Houston and in the Warren Wilson M.F.A. program.

Former Ploughshares guest-editor Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs was recently chosen as one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review. Moore guest-edited Ploughshares Vol. 24/2, a special all-fiction issue.

In an August review of the book, critic Jonathan Lethem called her "the most irresistible contemporary American writer: brainy, humane, unpretentious and warm; seemingly effortlessly lyrical; Lily-Tomlin-funny." The novel stars Tassie Keltjin, a twenty year old Wisconsin student whose passion for life far exceeds her current abilities to live it. She takes a job as a nanny to an eccentric couple pending their adoption of a child, and embarks on an affair with a mysterious foreign student. Meanwhile, her younger brother enlists in the military after 9/11, causing Tassie to feel the pressure of both her family and her class upon her. A Gate at the Stairs is Moore's first novel in over a decade.

View the book on Amazon.com.