Ploughshares

Founded in 1971 in the Plough and Stars pub in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by DeWitt Henry and Peter O'Malley, Ploughshares built its identity on the guest-editor model: each issue is shaped by a different prominent writer — past guest editors include Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Rita Dove, and Louise Glück — which keeps the aesthetic deliberately unsettled. It has been housed at Emerson College since 1989.

The journal reads June through January, charges a small online service fee (waived for subscribers and postal submissions), pays $45 per printed page ($90 minimum), and runs the Emerging Writer's Contest. Work from Ploughshares is a fixture of the Best American and Pushcart anthologies.