While you're making your AWP plans, don't forget about this one! The featured readers are going to bring down the house. We're excited to co-host w/ & . See you soon!
02/25/2025
Nicole Terez Dutton and Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky talk about the magic behind our workshops: YOUR VOICE! There are only a few days left to apply to our Residential Young Writers Workshop. Take a deep breath and complete those application drafts before the deadline. We hope to hear your voice in Gambier this summer.
02/21/2025
Listen to Misha Rai talk about the fearlessness we've seen among our Young Writers. The Young Writers Summer Residential Workshop is an intensive two-week workshop for intellectually curious, motivated high-school students who are eager to develop their creative and critical abilities with language—to become better, more productive writers and more insightful thinkers. Join us in Gambier this summer! Apply at the link in our bio.
02/17/2025
High school teachers: let your students know we're accepting applications for our Residential Young Writers Workshop until the end of the month!
The Young Writers Summer Residential Workshop is an intensive two-week workshop for intellectually curious, motivated high-school students who are eager to develop their creative and critical abilities with language—to become better, more productive writers and more insightful thinkers.
It's the last day to apply to our Residential Adult Writers Workshop! Today, we're shouting out our truly stellar creative nonfiction faculty across both sessions: , , , and ! Don't forget to hit send on that draft. Application at the link in our bio.
Happy Valentine's Day! Today we are sending love to our Session 2 Fiction Faculty (, , .helenebertino, and Bryan Washington) & all our faculty for our upcoming Residential Adult Writers Workshop. We're sending you love, too, wherever you are.
Applications close this Sunday! Apply at the link in our bio.
Say hello to our Session Two Poetry Faculty for our Residential Adult Writers Workshop: Dan Beachy-Quick, , , and ! Join us this summer in beautiful Gambier, Ohio on Kenyon's campus to join a supportive and rigorous writing community flourishing since 1995!
Looking to put a little extra heat into your prose? Generate some new work this summer on Kenyon's beautiful campus with us (shout out to our session one fiction faculty: , , , & Matthew Neil Null). Apply today the link in our bio!
Poets! Join us this summer in Gambier and dedicate a week to your craft. See what our session one poetry faculty(, , , ) have been up to, see the entirety of our faculty, and apply at the link in our bio.
Applications close NEXT SUNDAY for our Residential Adult Writers Workshop. Gambier is simply beautiful in the summer, and we hope you'll join us. Unlike other writing workshops, the Kenyon Review Writing Workshops are generative, focused on giving writers time and space to produce new work. Here you'll find a nurturing space to take creative risks and push your writing to the next level.
PLUS we are positively beaming about this faculty (shout out to , , , , Matthew Neill Null, ZZ Packer, , , , , , , , , .helenebertino, Bryan Washington, Dan Beachy-Quick, , , and . Find all the details at the link in our bio.
01/28/2025
January is somehow almost over, and the deadline for our Short Fiction Contest is this Friday! Submit today at the link in our bio.
Yesterday was the first day of our Young Writers Winter Online Workshop. We just wanted to send them some extra love as they embark on this new journey. We're excited to hear about your workshop experience, and if you're a participant, drop us a line so we can follow along.
01/25/2025
Our Fall 2024 issue has been out in the world for a couple of months now. Here it is all cozied up. We would love to hear what pieces from it have been sticking with you! Find it at the link in our bio as well as featured pieces from our front page.
Also if you contributed, and we aren't following you yet, drop us a line!
Today we are celebrating the winner of our 2024 Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize! The “vigor and verve,” as judge Richie Hofmann puts it, is remarkable and “makes an unforgettable self-portrait as well as a portrait of a relationship with a rich and complex history.”
It's the first day of our Winter Online Adult Writers Workshops, and we're so excited to see what our writers come up with. If you're a participant, and we're not following you here, drop us a line so we can keep with it.
Happy writing!
01/08/2025
Our Short Fiction Contest is open until the end of the month! This contest is open to any writer who has not published a book of fiction at the time of submission, and submissions must be no more than 3,000 words in length. Send us the piece you cannot stop thinking about—we're excited to read your best!
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Videos
"It's a space where we are saying not only are your ideas are valuable, but your ideas take center stage." @nifmuhammad talks about our Residential Young Writers Workshop. Our workshops are generative, and every year young writers come from all over the world to stretch their talents and develop their own unique voice. Applications close March 1st!
Nicole Terez Dutton and Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky talk about the magic behind our workshops: YOUR VOICE! There are only a few days left to apply to our Residential Young Writers Workshop. Take a deep breath and complete those application drafts before the deadline. We hope to hear your voice in Gambier this summer.
Listen to Misha Rai talk about the fearlessness we've seen among our Young Writers. The Young Writers Summer Residential Workshop is an intensive two-week workshop for intellectually curious, motivated high-school students who are eager to develop their creative and critical abilities with language—to become better, more productive writers and more insightful thinkers. Join us in Gambier this summer! Apply at the link in our bio.
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
In the heart of literature since 1939. journal | workshops | fellowships
