How Writers Can Contribute to Ploughshares

Ploughshares outlines clear pathways for writers hoping to contribute to its blog, detailing the categories it publishes and the standards that guide its editorial decisions. The journal prioritizes pitches for critical essays, personal essays, longform hybrids, interviews, and reviews, emphasizing strong arguments, narrative clarity, and a demonstrable understanding of literary conversation. With a preference for shaping pieces from pitch to draft and firm guidelines around ethics and eligibility, the publication offers emerging and established writers a structured, competitive route into one of contemporary literature’s most respected platforms.

Ploughshares remains one of the most respected venues for contemporary literature, and its contributors often arrive through the journal’s active call for essays, interviews, and reviews for the Ploughshares blog. While pitches are currently paused, the publication offers detailed guidance on the kinds of work it commissions and how writers can prepare strong proposals once submissions reopen. The editorial team’s expectations are exacting by design. Writers are encouraged to approach the blog not as an entry point but as an extension of the journal’s long-standing commitment to rigor, originality, and literary engagement.

The blog publishes five primary categories of work: critical essays, personal essays, blended longform essays, interviews, and book reviews. Each category has distinct aims, tones, and pitch requirements, and the editors prefer to collaborate with writers from concept through draft rather than evaluating fully completed pieces.

Critical essays form the foundation of the blog’s editorial identity. These pieces take literature seriously as a cultural, emotional, and intellectual force. Successful proposals present a clear subject, argument, and angle; articulate why the topic matters now; and provide two or three writing samples that demonstrate analytical depth. Writers are also asked to identify how their perspective differs from anything Ploughshares has previously published on the same subject. Critical essays begin at thirteen hundred words, and payment is tied to the proposed word count.

Personal essays must maintain a tether to literature, even when the connection is subtle. Editors look for strong voice, narrative movement, and introspection. Pitch emails should summarize the experience or arc the writer intends to explore, include writing samples, and specify an anticipated word count. As with critical essays, completed drafts are not accepted during the pitch stage.

Blended longform essays combine criticism and personal narrative, often asking what literature makes possible in a writer’s life or in the culture at large. These pieces run over 3,000 words and require clear articulation of the subject, argument, and relevance. Pitches must show evidence that the writer can sustain both narrative and analytical momentum over a long-form structure.

Interviews appear less frequently but remain part of the blog’s publishing landscape. Proposals must confirm the interview subject, explain the timeliness of the conversation, and disclose any preexisting relationship between interviewer and interviewee. Completed interviews may be submitted for consideration, though requests involving current Ploughshares or Emerson College employees are not eligible.

Book reviews focus exclusively on forthcoming titles and are published ahead of release dates. Pitches must identify the book’s author, publisher, and publication date, along with writing samples. The blog will provide review copies for accepted pitches. As with interviews, reviews of books written by friends, family, or institutional affiliates cannot be considered.

Across all categories, writers may use unpublished writing samples in their pitches, and payments are issued the month after publication. The editors emphasize clarity in subject lines, adherence to category guidelines, and an understanding of the publication’s archival history. The expectation is not only that writers bring strong ideas but that they demonstrate how their ideas fit within Ploughshares’ ongoing conversation about literature’s present and future.

Aspiring contributors can reach the editorial team at blog@pshares.org, but the most valuable preparation begins long before sending an email. Familiarity with the journal’s tone, curiosity about its archive, and a willingness to sharpen an idea into a clear argument or narrative remain the traits that most reliably move a pitch toward acceptance.