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12/13/2024
The deadline to apply to our Winter Online Writers Workshops is this weekend! Whether you are at work on short stories or a novel, our Fiction Faculty are sure to help you stir up something new and exhilarating. This year's staff is a list of true stunners:
Farah Ali (.06), Gina Chung (), Rachel Heng (), Jamil Jan Kochai (), Joseph Earl Thomas (), and Nafissa Thompson-Spires (.thompson.spires)!
This coming Sunday is the last day to apply to our Winter Online Adult Writers Workshops! Essay writers, memoirists, nonfiction writers of all kinds—we have a truly stellar lineup of faculty to work with. Apply at the link in our bio!
worked as a journalist, a documentary filmmaker, a zookeeper, a modern dancer, and a Greenwich Village waiter before realizing he wanted to be a writer. He is author of the memoirs To Hell With It and Between Panic & Desire, winner of the Grub Street Nonfiction Book Prize, The Accidental Buddhist: Mindfulness, Enlightenment, and Sitting Still, the writing guide Crafting the Personal Essay, and is editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction, among many other books. He has published essays and stories in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, Short Reads, and elsewhere. He is founding editor of Brevity, the journal of flash nonfiction
Elena Passarello is a writer, a performer, and the recipient of a Whiting Award. Her essays on performance, pop culture, and the natural world have been translated into six languages. Recent essays appear in the New York Times Book Review, McSweeney’s, National Geographic, Paris Review, and Best American Science and Nature Writing. She is the author of two collections; the most recent of which, Animals Strike Curious Poses, was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. Her book on Elvis Presley’s films and his cultural legacy will be released by Penguin Press in 2026.
is the author of several books of innovative poetry and hybrid prose. Her memoir, Never Again Volunteer Yourself, is forthcoming in 2025. Her latest poetry book is Anodyne (, 2020), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Individual poems, interviews, and essays appear in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Yale Review, The Offing, and widely elsewhere. A Cave Canem alum, she holds a PhD in English and Literary Arts from University of Denver, an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles, and teaches literature, poetics, and all genres of creative writing.
Seeing that the end of the November bumping up with the holiday was a busy time for many, we've received a few requests to continue to submit to our Poetry Contest, so we've reopened it and set the deadline to match our Short Nonfiction Contest: December 31! The final judge for our Poetry Contest is , and the final judge for our Short Nonfiction Contest is !
Learn more & submit to either one or both at the link in our bio.
Diane Seuss’s most recent collection is Modern Poetry ( 2024), currently a finalist for the National Book Award. frank: sonnets (Graywolf Press 2021) was the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the PEN Voelcker Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (Graywolf Press 2018) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Four-Legged Girl (Graywolf Press 2015) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Seuss was a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. She received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2021. She was recently elected to the Academy of American Poets Board of Chancellors. Seuss was raised by a single mother in rural Michigan, which she continues to call home.
Lucy Ives is the author of three novels: Impossible Views of the World, published by Penguin Press and selected as a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World, published by Soft Skull Press and also a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; and Life Is Everywhere, published by Graywolf Press and a best book of 2022 with The New Yorker and the Seattle Times.
Her short fiction is collected in the recent Cosmogony (, 2021). Her most recent book of essays, An Image of My Name Enters America, was published by Graywolf Press. Photo Courtesy of Will Matsuda
12/09/2024
All right, high school writers: today is the last day to apply to our Young Writers Winter Online Workshops! We have so many exciting workshops planned! All details at the link in our bio.
Negesti Kaudo is an essayist based in Columbus, Ohio. Her debut collection, Ripe: Essays was published by Mad Creek Books in 2022. She has taught writing at Columbia College Chicago, CCAD, and VCFA. Currently, she spends her summers teaching at the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop.
Matt Kelsey is the Content Manager at Narrative. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. He has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Idyllwild Arts.
Chukwuma Ndulue is a writer, teacher, and occasional small engine mechanic. He has an MFA from Columbia University and is the author of the chapbook Boys Quarter (Ugly Duckling Presse).
Angela Chaidez Vincent writes poetry and fiction from a background of livelihoods in engineering and mathematics. The author of ARENA GLOW (Tourane Poetry Press), Angela holds an MFA and her writing has appeared in Oxford Review of Books, North American Review, and 32 Poems, among others. She lives in California.
Nathan Xavier Osorio’s debut collection, Querida, was selected by Shara McCallum as the winner of the 2024 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. He received his PhD in Literature from UC Santa Cruz. He is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Irvine.
Jamie Lyn Smith is a writer, editor, and teacher. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Mississippi Review, The Kenyon Review, The Pinch and other fine magazines. She is the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence award and author of the short story collectionTownship.
Paige Webb’s poems appear in Anomaly, Blackbird, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry Northwest, West Branch, their chapbook Tussle, and elsewhere. They are a PhD candidate at University of Cincinnati, where they earned the William Boyce Teaching Award, and have taught Kenyon Young Writers since 2012.
12/07/2024
Young writers! Our deadline to apply for this coming Winter Online workshops is nearly here. Take a look at three more exciting offerings and find all of the workshops and application guidelines at the link in our bio. It is totally free to apply!
K.E. Og () grew up in Honolulu, Hawai’i and is a multi genre writer and performer, winner of the New Women’s Voices poetry prize for her book WHAT THE BODY ALREADY KNOWS. Her essays, poems, and short stories have been published in Kenyon Review Online, Brevity, Louisiana Literature, and Streetlight Magazine.
Mathias Svalina () is the author of eight books, most recently Thank You Terror from Big Lucks Books. A founding editor of Octopus Books, Svalina also runs a Dream Delivery Service, & has worked with the Denver MCA, the Poetry Foundation, & the University of Arizona Poetry Center.
Andy Jiaming Tang () is the author of Cinema Love, a Dakota Johnson x Teatime Book Club Pick. He’s received fellowships and support from the Kenyon Review and the Center for Fiction, and his work has been published in: Jezebel, AGNI, Joyland Magazine, LitHub, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Three more awesome workshops from our Young Writers Winter Online Workshops! Read a description of these three workshops and learn more about all of our programming for this session at the link in our bio.
Negesti Kaudo () is an essayist based in Columbus, Ohio. Her debut collection, Ripe: Essays was published by Mad Creek Books in 2022. She has taught writing at Columbia College Chicago, CCAD, and VCFA. Currently, she spends her summers teaching at the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop.
Matt Kelsey () is the managing editor of Rhino and teaches at Hive Center for Book Arts. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. He has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Idyllwild Arts.
We're absolutely glowing about our Poetry Faculty for this round of our Adult Writers Winter Online Workshops. This session's poetry cohort will be taught by Leila Chatti (), Tyree Daye (), Christian Gullette (), Richie Hofmann (), Lisa Low (), and Natalie Shapero (.natalie.shapero).
Our Winter Online Workshops offer participants a unique opportunity to learn from three different faculty members in the same genre over six weeks. Our online workshops are generative, and the focus is on creating new work. Come and join our rigorous and inspiring literary community of workshoppers and thinkers!
Take a look at all the workshop sessions planned for our upcoming Young Writers Winter Online Workshops on our website. 2025's workshop will take place from January 25 – March 1, 2025. High school teachers—spread the word to your students!
Today we're shouting out three of our workshops scheduled for the afternoon:
Feminist & Q***r Approaches to Creative Writing with
Translating Memory with Julia Grawemeyer
The Weird Turn Pro: Finding Your Voice Through Play and Experimentation with
We are accepting submissions for our Poetry Contest until the end of the month! This year's judge is . Poets who have not published a book at the time of submissions can send us 3–5 poems, no longer than 10 pages. All guidelines at the link in our bio.
Diane Seuss’s most recent collection is Modern Poetry (, 2024), currently a finalist for the National Book Award. frank: sonnets (Graywolf Press 2021) was the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the PEN Voelcker Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (Graywolf Press 2018) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Four-Legged Girl (Graywolf Press 2015) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Seuss was a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. She received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2021. She was recently elected to the Academy of American Poets Board of Chancellors. Seuss was raised by a single mother in rural Michigan, which she continues to call home.
We have an amazing faculty ready for our Winter Online Writers Workshops! These workshops offer participants a unique opportunity to learn from three different faculty members in the same genre over six weeks. The workshops meet for two hours every Saturday from 2:00–4:00 pm ET starting January 18, 2025.
Our online workshops are generative, and the focus is on creating new work. Find the application, faculty list, and workshop details at the link in our bio.
We are now accepting submissions for our Short Nonfiction Contest. We are fortunate and excited to have Lucy Ives as this year's final judge!
The winning essay will be published in print (with corresponding contributor payment), and the author is awarded a full scholarship to attend the Kenyon Review Writers Workshops. Find all the guidelines at the link in our bio.
Lucy Ives is the author of three novels: Impossible Views of the World, published by Penguin Press and selected as a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World, published by Soft Skull Press and also a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; and Life Is Everywhere, published by Graywolf Press and a best book of 2022 with The New Yorker and the Seattle Times.
Her short fiction is collected in the recent Cosmogony (Soft Skull Press, 2021). In spring 2020, Siglio Press published The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader, the first definitive anthology of poet-architect Gins’s poetry and prose, edited and with an introduction by Ives. Ives’s writing has appeared in Art in America, Artforum, The Baffler, The Believer, The Chronicle of Higher Education, frieze, Granta, Harper’s, Lapham’s Quarterly, n+1, and Vogue, among other publications. For five years she was an editor with the online magazine Triple Canopy.
A graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from New York University. She is currently Bonderman Assistant Professor of the Practice in Literary Arts at Brown University and was a recipient of a 2018 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.
Her most recent book of essays, An Image of My Name Enters America, was published by .
"What are the young poets thinking and writing about?
In reading this year’s brilliant submissions for the Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize, awarded to the very best writing by poets in high school, I’ve found that the young poets are taking on all the ancient subjects. The complexity of self. Of having a body. Of living in a time and in a place. Confronting loneliness, desire, the complicated inheritances of family and history. As always, they’re asking the impossible questions: Who am I? Where do I come from? Where are we going?
And they’re giving force to the exploration of those questions with what the craft of poetry makes available: a music in and behind the words we hear every day, and an artful arrangement—attentive to sound, of course, but also to meaning—that makes order out of chaos or destabilizes what is so often taken for granted.
All the young poets who submitted this year (more than 1,500) are making their first serious strides and are taking their own poems seriously, courageously, in the world beyond their heads and imaginations, beyond the privacy of their notebooks."
Read all of 's Introduction to the winners of our 2024 Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize in our Fall 2024 issue at the link in our bio. Starting tomorrow, all week long we will be featuring the winners on our front page!
A story we will be thinking about for a long time to come—read "Caídas" by Jared Lemus in our Fall 2024 issue at the link in our bio.
Jared Lemus is the author of two works of fiction forthcoming from Ecco: his story collection, Guatemalan Rhapsody, will be published in spring 2025, and his novel will be published in 2027. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Story, Pinch, KROnline, PANK, Cleaver, and Joyland, among others. Lemus holds an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh, where he currently works as a visiting professor of fiction writing.
We are reading and re-reading "The Haircut" by Elise Thi Tran in our Fall '24 issue at the link in our bio. Spend some time with it, take some deep breaths, and stay hydrated.
tran is a Vietnamese Filipina American writer and poet. She is a Chicago Literary Club Collyer Fellow (2021–24) and a fiction judge for NYC Midnight. Tran’s manuscript in progress, Dredged from the Courtyard Pond, won the 2022 First Pages Prize. Her nonfiction, poetry, and visual work appears or is forthcoming in Apogee, Blackbird, diode, the minnesota review, River Styx, Salt Hill, TIMBER, and elsewhere.
Thank you to everyone who came to our gala to honor Zadie Smith as the recipient of The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement! Read her speech at the link in our bio—she connects the recent election with a story by Flannery O’Connor originally published in KR.
You can read “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” by Flannery O’Connor in our Spring 1953 issue at the link in Zadie's speech.
We are sharing some photos from the evening. It was truly special to be in community with each one of you for this—especially as we continue to celebrate our 85th anniversary year.
(Photos by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Kenyon Review)
We are now accepting applications for our Young Writers Winter Online Workshops! High school teachers—be sure to spread the word to your students!
The Young Writers Winter Online Workshops provide young writers with a dynamic and supportive environment in which they can stretch their talents, discover new strengths, and challenge themselves in the company of peers who are also passionate about writing.
Our Winter Online Workshops offer an intimate setting for exploring a specific genre, craft element, or theme. Over the course of six weeks, students produce fresh work, improve their writing skills, explore their unique voice and perspective, and discuss the craft of writing (and rewriting) with instructors and other students.
Find all the details and read more about the workshops and faculty at the link in our bio.
Tense and enthralling—read "Fisherboy" by Issa Quincy in our Rural Spaces folio from our Fall '24 issue at the link in our bio.
Issa Quincy is a British writer based in New York City. He grew up in Oxford and studied philosophy and literature. While studying, he worked in theater, writing and directing his own plays in both London and Norwich. He spent several years working as an archivist. His poetry has appeared in The London Magazine and has been anthologized by New Rivers Press. Quincy’s fiction has appeared in Transition Magazine. His debut novel, Absence, is forthcoming from Granta in spring 2025.
Poets! Our contest is open until Nov. 30. This year's final judge is . Please send us one poem—your favorite poem, the one you cannot stop thinking about, the one stashed away ready to make its way through the world. The winning poetry will be published in print (with corresponding contributor payment), and the author is awarded a full scholarship to attend the Kenyon Review Writers Workshops.
All guidelines at the link in our bio.
Diane Seuss’s most recent collection is Modern Poetry (Graywolf Press 2024), currently a finalist for the National Book Award. frank: sonnets (Graywolf Press 2021) was the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the PEN Voelcker Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (Graywolf Press 2018) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Four-Legged Girl (Graywolf Press 2015) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Seuss was a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. She received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2021. She was recently elected to the Academy of American Poets Board of Chancellors. Seuss was raised by a single mother in rural Michigan, which she continues to call home.
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For many years any description or overview of the Kenyon Review has begun, understandably enough, at the beginning. In 1939, so the story goes, John Crowe Ransom, a noted poet and critic, enticed by Kenyon College from his post at Vanderbilt, launched a new literary journal. During the 1940s and ’50s it rightly remained one of the most lauded publications in the land. But the 1960s witnessed turmoil and profound change in the literary landscape, as well as elsewhere, and in 1969 the college, desperately short of cash, shuttered KR’s transom for a full decade.
Though it’s hard to believe, 2019 will be not only the eightieth anniversary of KR’s initial publication, but the fortieth anniversary of its revival under the leadership of Ronald Sharp and Frederick Turner—a longer run by a full decade than the Old Series. It’s a proud history and an incredible archive, which I value deeply and honor often.
And yet. It is not uncommon when I am speaking publicly about the Kenyon Review that older folk call to mind the glory of a vanished era, while younger writers and readers assume that we can have little interest in them or relevance to their lives. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course, but it’s wearying to fight against the heavy tides of such preconceptions over and over again.
I have no intention of rewriting history or of renouncing Mr. Ransom’s legacy. The glory was real, and the achievement wonderfully substantial. But the world has changed, and we have changed. From now on that’s not where we will begin the conversation about the Kenyon Review. It’s what we’re doing now that will be our focus, as well as what we aspire to in the future.
Over the past twenty-five years we have worked hard to publish a broad swathe of authors of superb caliber who also better reflect the complexities of American society. Last year, for example, we published more women than men, and we are committed to maintaining that balance as closely as possible. Likewise, we are striving to identify, recruit, and publish many more authors of color. (Such goals do not affect our evaluation of submissions, and often a writer’s gender or identity may be impossible to know.) Magazines like ours have long believed an open submissions period is the most fair and democratic way to hear from new voices. But over the last eighty years, many writers we’d like to publish haven’t had the time, funds, or institutional support to submit to magazines like the Review. Our staff is in conversation about the best way to connect to the writers who have been underrepresented in literature and our own magazine and how we can better support them in our pages and in our programs.
Perhaps even more striking has been the expansion of the Kenyon Review writing workshops for high school students and adults. Since these programs have become more central to our mission, the numbers and diversity of faculty and participants have continued to climb. KR Young Writers, for example, flooded with applications, grows more selective each year. The students who come to Gambier from across the nation and around the world are tremendously talented—working with them is one of the great joys of my life. This past summer more than half, split across two full sessions, identified themselves as nonwhite.
We also launched a pilot program of Young Science Writers, developed and taught by two professors of biology at Kenyon College and distinguished writers themselves. The students did real scientific work in laboratories, as well as streams and fields, and used an observatory to study the stars. Their writing about the experiences ranged far and wide—we look for that program to grow quickly as well.
And this year the writers workshops for adults boldly expanded beyond traditional genres of fiction, literary nonfiction, and poetry, as well as our first workshop for translators, a workshop in nature writing, and one geared toward high school teachers that we have offered in recent years. As we continue to break down traditional genres and categories, participants had the chance to explore new classes in spiritual writing and writing in hybrid forms.
And we even managed to move forward on long-held ambitions to host summer seminars for visitors wishing to visit beautiful Kenyon and engage in a stimulating intellectual community. This year two distinguished visiting professors offered seminars in Presidential Greatness and Space, Time, Flight: Five Films. Next year we’ll build on these as well.
In other words, our mission has expanded to supporting the work of writers more broadly through our programs, fellowships, awards, and outreach to a community of writers and readers. We’re not just gatekeepers anymore. We devote much of our time and energy to cultivating new literary voices and helping writers learn their craft.
It’s precisely because of all this ongoing literary evolution, in publications and in programs, that I intend to focus on what we are doing today—and an evermore exciting future—as we define this independent literary arts organization known throughout the world as the Kenyon Review.
—DHL
