Emerson College recently named Jenny Molberg editor in chief of Ploughshares, the celebrated quarterly journal that has published poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, for more than fifty years. Molberg, the author of the poetry collection The Court of No Record (LSU Press, 2023), joins Ploughshares after a decade at the University of Central Missouri, where she served as editor in chief of Pleiades and director of Pleiades Press while teaching English and creative writing. In her new appointment, Molberg will both edit Ploughshares and work as a professor of writing, literature, and publishing at Emerson College. Molberg spoke about her plans for the journal and her belief that literature can heal the world.
Jenny Molberg was recently named editor in chief of Ploughshares. (Credit: Jonny Ulasien)
What excites you about your new role?
Ploughshares has an amazing staff and an editorial associate program with the MFA students. I am also spearheading an undergrad internship, which hasn’t existed before. I’m really excited to think about who the guest editors will be, to mentor graduate students, to work with all women in leadership [at Emerson] who champion Ploughshares’ place in the literary dialogue and are excited about what else can happen. Also, the city of Boston and the allure of a vibrant arts community.
What is the essence of Ploughshares that you want to preserve?
In the Old Testament story, [the prophet Isaiah declares people will] hammer their swords into ploughshares. That gesture of cultivation rather than destruction is embodied in the rich history of Ploughshares and very specifically in the Emerging Writer’s Contest. The journal is so cognizant of putting established writers who we love and admire next to exciting emerging writers and treating them with equal enthusiasm. I will be only the fourth editor in fifty-four years, which shows me that these people who came before me really loved it. And it shows in the work. I want to be sure I’m doing it justice.
What changes do you hope to make?
I want to name a new fiction editor, and I hope to broaden the editorial team. Community is so integral to our work in literary publishing, and this is not any sort of criticism because I think this happens with a lot of literary magazines that are so respected, but the literary community at large becomes the community we are focusing on. I want to think about how the journal can be better integrated into Emerson and into Boston, including focusing on Boston-area visual artists on the covers of Ploughshares. Something I started at AWP with Pleiades [alongside other journals] is a project called Words Matter. We had our contributors go to local high schools and teach their own poems or a poem they admired. Then those high school students taught middle schoolers a poem. This project is a way to impact the community positively. I’d like the editorial associates at Ploughshares to go out into the community and teach a generative workshop. Let’s start conversations with the incredible digitized archive—for example, a poem from the Carolyn Forché issue in conversation with one from the recent issue. I want to slow down and have these editorial associates consider: What is our history? Why does it matter? [Those conversations] could be a podcast or whatever the grad students want to do, for example, TikTok or Instagram. [The digital-first series] Ploughshares Solos has been a space for publishing longer prose. Could we publish some visual poetry or long poetry sequences? I love the print journal, but I think the space that the online format can offer is exciting.
What qualities do you bring to the job?
As a poet, teacher, and editor I am really dedicated to writing that witnesses, writing that engages with issues that have historically been silenced and reintroduces them to the conversation. For my latest book I wrote a poem about a neighbor of mine who was in her eighties and the first victim of this serial killer in Baton Rouge. I wanted to honor her and think about violence and our cultural obsession with violence. Her niece wrote to me to say, “I Googled my aunt, and everything that always comes up is her death, but then I came across your poem.” That made me cry because this work that we do to reframe the conversations around violence or war or silencing actually matters. As a teacher I’m thinking about what literature will speak to my students right now, knowing the struggles that they’re encountering and the spaces their voices want to fill.
You wrote in your introductory letter, “I think of great writing as advocacy for conditions of peace.” Can you explain?
The author bell hooks said great literature bears witness to struggles of domination, both in the family realm and in the global realm. I don’t mean that every poem or essay has to take something global to task, but that it grapples with some injustice. Most great writing does that. hooks said witnessing can also be healing. When you are writing about something difficult or scary and someone approaches you and says, “Me too,” that’s creating conditions of peace. It demystifies and disempowers oppression.
What would a world where lit mags fulfilled their greatest potential look like?
At our AWP [Words Matter] event, we’d all been at the high school the day before, and we’d all been weeping over the students’ work, so there was this emotional charge. Our contributor reading started with Kim Addonizio playing a Train song on the harmonica. Everyone was hooting and hollering. We had a DJ, and everybody stormed the stage, and then outside we had a taco truck, so after dancing we had tacos. This—this is what it would look like. Just to celebrate the work of writers.
Emily Pérez is the author of What Flies Want (University of Iowa Press, 2022), which received the Iowa Poetry Prize, and a coeditor of the anthology The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood (University of Georgia Press, 2022). She lives in Denver with her family.
