Plough Quarterly No. 30 - Made Perfect

Molly McCully Brown is the author of the essay collection Places I’ve Taken my Body—published in the United States in 2020 by Persea Books and in the United Kingdom in 2021 by Faber & Faber— and the poetry collection The Virginia State Colony For Epileptics and Feebleminded (Persea Books, 2017), which won the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize and was named a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2017. With Susannah Nevison, she is coauthor of the poetry collection In The Field Between Us (Persea Books, 2020), an NEA Big Read selection. Brown has been the recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, a United States Artists Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship and the Jeff Baskin Writers Fellowship from the Oxford American magazine. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Paris Review,  The Guardian, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times, The Yale Review and elsewhere. She is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Sewanee: the University of the South, and Editor-in-Chief of Image Journal.

Christian Wiman is the Clement-Muehl Professor of the Arts at Yale Divinity School. He is the author, editor, or translator of fifteen books, including Zero at the Bone and Hammer Is the Prayer. His work appears regularly in Harper’s, The New Yorker, and Commonweal.

Ross Douthat has been a New York Times Opinion columnist since April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at the Atlantic. He is the author of The Deep Places; The Decadent Society; To Change the Church; Bad Religion; Privilege; and, with Reihan Salam, Grand New Party. He is the film critic for National Review. He lives with his wife and five children in New Haven, Connecticut.

Eugene Vodolazkin’s second novel, Laurus, won both of Russia’s major literary awards, the National Big Book Award and the Yasnaya Polyana Book Award, and was shortlisted for the National Bestseller Prize and the Russian Booker Prize. His debut novel, Solovyov and Larionov, was shortlisted for the Andrei Bely Prize and the Big Book Award. Two other critically acclaimed novels, The Aviator and Brisbane, have also been translated into English. Vodolazkin was the 2019 winner of the Solzhenitsyn Prize. He was born in Kiev in 1964 and has worked in the department of Old Russian Literature at Pushkin House since 1990. He is an expert in medieval history and folklore and has numerous academic books and articles to his name. The author lives with his family in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Sarah C. Williams trained as an historian at the University of Oxford, where she subsequently taught British and European political and cultural history. After seventeen years at Oxford, in 2005 she moved with her family to Vancouver, Canada, where she taught history at Regent College. Today Williams lives with her husband Paul in the Cotswolds, close to the city of Oxford, where she continues her research, writing, and teaching. The daughter of popular British author Jennifer Rees Larcombe, Williams is the author of Perfectly Human, a spiritual autobiography in which she reflects on contemporary debates surrounding identity and personhood.

Leah Libresco Sargeant works on family policy in Washington, DC. She is the author of Building the Benedict Option and Arriving at Amen. She runs the Substack community Other Feminisms.