In the heart of literature since 1939. journal | workshops | fellowships
linktr.ee/kenyonreview
(16)
11/01/2024
Narrowing line breaks heighten a sense of danger and decisive judgement in this astonishing poem by Faylita Hicks. Read "Cult Classic: The Thousand Oaks Youth Ranch in Corsicana, Texas" in our Rural Spaces folio at the link in our bio.
Faylita Hicks is a q***r Afro-Latinx multi-disciplinary artist, writer, hoodoo practitioner, and cultural strategist advocating for people directly impacted by the carceral system. An Art for Justice Fund grantee, voting member of the Recording Academy, and winner of the 2020 Sappho Poetry Award from Palette Poetry, they are the author of A Map of My Want (, 2024) and HoodWitch (, 2019), a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry. Currently based in Chicago, they are working on their forthcoming memoir about their pretrial incarceration, A Body of Wild Light (Haymarket Books, 2026), their next contemporary jazz-infused spoken word album, and a digitally immersive performance piece tentatively entitled The Echoes.
"Deer Head Hoop" has stopped us in its tracks with its haunting image. Find it in our Rural Spaces folio in our Fall 2024 issue at the link in our bio.
Kai Carlson-Wee is the author of Rail (, 2018). He has received a Pushcart Prize, a MacDowell Fellowship, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship. He lives in San Francisco and is a lecturer at Stanford University.
Applications for the KR Developmental Editing Fellowship for Emerging Writers open November 1st!
Designed to nurture and develop new voices in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, the fellowship will provide support for emerging writers who demonstrate exceptional talent, promise, and commitment to their chosen craft. Participation in the program involves one-on-one mentorship by an experienced editor on the KR team over a period of four months. Fellows can expect to have monthly hour-long conversations with a Developmental Editor, who will provide feedback and suggestions on a book draft.
Learn more about the opportunity, 2024 fellows, and eligibility requirements at the link in our bio.
It's here! The Fall 2024 issue of The Kenyon Review includes the winner and runners-up for the Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers, selected by ; the winner of the First Annual Poetry Contests selected by ; and a Rural Spaces folio guest-edited by , Brian Michael Murphy, and Andrew Grace, with poetry by , , , and Alberto Rios; fiction by , Chee Brossy, , and Issa Quincy; and nonfiction by Apyang Imiq translated by brenda lin; and much more, including interior and cover art by .
Jump in at the link in our bio.
Cover Image Details:
Ming Smith
Self-Portrait (1989)
Archival print 36 x 24 in.
Courtesy of Ming Smith Studio and The Gund at .
10/21/2024
In this essay by Mohan Sikka grief, love, and variations of contact and intimacy reverberate through one another with both harmony and dissonance that is beautifully layered.
Read "Contact" in our Summer '24 issue at the link in our bio.
Mohan Sikka is a writer and artist based part-time in New York City. He daylights as a management consultant and coach for NGOs globally. Sikka’s fiction, articles, and essays have been published in The O. Henry Prize Stories and Delhi Noir, as well as in One Story, National Geographic Traveller India, Nonprofit Quarterly, and Open. His story “The Railway Aunty” was adapted into the film B.A. Pass and won Best Story at the 2014 Bollywood Screen Awards. Follow Sikka on Ins@mo_brooklyn.
If you’re in the neighborhood for Family Weekend at or around in general, join us tomorrow for this special reading and conversation with editorial team member and KR Fellow .
These two writers will read from their work and then discuss the Kenyon Review’s editorial process as well as upcoming projects like the “Rural Spaces” portfolio. A Q&A will follow the discussion.
10/16/2024
With an alluring form, "Zodiac of Earthly Signs" by Simon Shieh delights in a new way with each subsequent reread. Read it at the link in our bio.
Simon Shieh is the author of Master (, 2023), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry and finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His poems and essays are published in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Best New Poets, Guernica, and The Yale Review, among others, and have been recognized with a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.
"History. The whole thing is a laugh, a vestigial tail dangling off the tip of geological time. (Making history, is that what you’re about, big boy? A. aegypti asks Alexander the “Great,” asks Genghis Khan.)"
Read & listen "Bloodsucker" by Analía Villagra in our Extinction folio from our Summer '24 issue (link in bio). Let the mosquito guide you in this voyage through time.
Analía Villagra’s short fiction has appeared in Colorado Review, Ecotone, Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. Villagra is a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship recipient. Her writing has also been supported by the Sewanee Writers’ Conference (where she was a Tennessee Williams Scholar), the Tin House Workshop, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. An assistant fiction editor at Split Lip Magazine, she lives in Oakland.
Next month, we will gather to celebrate Zadie Smith as this year's recipient of The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement. This award exists to honor careers of extraordinary literary achievement. This year's gala is very special as we're also celebrating our 85th anniversary.
The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement will be awarded at a gala and dinner on Friday, November 8, 2024 at the iconic Mandarin Oriental New York from 6:30-9:30 p.m., business attire. This event serves as The Review’s central fundraising effort for the year and provides significant support to scholarships for the summer writing programs.
Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW, Swing Time and The Fraud; as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia; three collections of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free and Intimations; a collection of short stories, Grand Union; and the play, The Wife of Willesden, adapted from Chaucer. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People. She has won literary awards including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian First Book Award, and has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the American Academy of Letters and has twice been listed as one of Granta’s ’20 Best Young British Novelists’. She writes regularly for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. She was born in north-west London, where she still lives.
Smart, lyrical, and deeply resonating—read & listen to "Deep Down, Every Sinner" by Iain Haley Po***ck in its entirety in our Summer '24 issue at the link in our bio.
Iain Haley Po***ck will also be reading at our 85th Anniversary Reading this Wednesday at the Center for Fiction! Details for that can also be found at the link in our bio. If you're in the area, we hope to see you there!
Iain Haley Po***ck is the author of three poetry collections, Spit Back a Boy (, 2011), Ghost, Like a Place (, 2018), and the forthcoming All the Possible Bodies (Alice James Books, September 2025). Po***ck has received several including the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Poetry, the Bin Ramke Prize for Poetry, and a nomination for an NAACP Image Award. He directs the MFA program in creative writing at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York.
We are now accepting applications for our KR Fellowships! This initiative was inspired by the great tradition of Kenyon Review literary fellowships awarded in the 1950s to writers such as Flannery O’Connor and W.S. Merwin in their formative years. These fellowships represent a significant fulfillment of one aspect of our continuing mission: to recognize, publish, and support extraordinary authors in the early stages of their careers.
KR Fellows are expected to undertake a significant writing project and attend regular individual meetings with faculty mentors; teach one class per semester in the English Department of Kenyon College, contingent upon departmental needs; assist with creative and editorial projects for The Kenyon Review; participate in the cultural life of Kenyon College by regularly attending readings, lectures, presentations, and other campus activities.
Please submit applications by Oct. 18th to ensure full consideration. Find all the details at the link in our bio.
09/30/2024
Join us October 9th, 7 p.m. at The Center for Fiction to celebrate our 85th anniversary!
We're hosting Lucy Ives, author of "An Image of My Mind Enters America (Graywolf Press, 2024); Iain Haley Po***ck, author of "Ghost, Like a Place" (Alice James Books, 2018) and featuring a special presentation by Daisy Desrosiers—Director and Chief Curator of The Gund at Kenyon College.
All details can be found at the link in our bio.
Center for Fiction
15 Lafayette Avenue
Brooklyn, NY
We're hosting Lucy Ives (), author of "An Image of My Mind Enters America" (, 2024); Iain Haley Po***ck@boy_ghost_poet), author of "Ghost, Like a Place" , 2018), and a special presentation by Daisy Desrosiers )—Director, and Chief Curator of@gundgalleryat@kenyoncollege.
All details can be found at the link in our bio.
15 Lafayette Street
Brooklyn, N.Y. 11217
October 9th, 7PM
"A Disappearance" by noam kein is a must read. Find it in our Summer '24 issue at the link in our bio.
noam keim is a trauma worker, medicine maker, and flâneur freak living in Philadelphia. Their nonfiction writing weaves themes close to their heart: reverence for the land, healing, q***rness, colonialism, plants, and abolition. They are a 2022 Lambda Fellow, a 2023 Roots. Wounds. Words. Fellow, a 2023 Tin House Fellow, a Sewanee Writers’ Conference Contributor in 2023, and a 2023 Periplus Fellow. Their first essay collection, The Land Is Holy, won the Megaphone Prize, judged by Hanif Abdurraqib, and came out via Radix Media in May 2024.
Send us something with heart. All guidelines can be viewed at the link in our bio.
09/02/2024
We're accepting submissions until September 30th! Please send us your work!
Submissions Information and Guidelines Our Submissions portal is open between September 1 and September 30, 2024. In 2025, our magazine will feature folios on the following themes: With VISITATION we […]
08/29/2024
Read this truly awesome poem—"Shibboleth: A Mapping / Jishin-no-ben" by . This remarkable piece deals with how language bears our hearts or ultimately fails to—and to whom. Read it in our Summer '24 issue at the link in our bio.
Lee Ann Roripaugh (she/they) is a bi-racial Nisei and the author of five volumes of poetry, most recently tsunami vs. the fukushima 50 (, 2019), which was named a Best Book of 2019 by the New York Public Library, selected as a poetry finalist in the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards, cited as a Society of Midland Authors 2020 Honoree in Poetry, and named one of the 50 Must-Read Poetry Collections in 2019 by Book Riot. Her collection of fiction, Reveal Codes, was selected as winner of the Moon City Short Fiction Award and was published by Moon City Press in late 2023, and their chapbook, , a winner in the Chapbook Contest, was released by Diode Press in 2023. She was named winner of the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry/Prose for 2004, and she was a 1998 winner of the National Poetry Series. The South Dakota State poet laureate from 2015 to 2019, Roripaugh is a professor of English at the University of South Dakota, where they serve as editor in chief of South Dakota Review.
"The last real cowboy is a Palestinian boy
in a black-and-white photo on the wall
he’s five years old. The boy is my father.
He drives a green big rig truck
across the United States. Sleeps
in its bed, calls me from rest stops."
We are returning to this poem by Jessica Abughattas again and again. Find & read "The Last Real Cowboy" in our Summer '24 issue at the link in our bio.
Jessica Abughattas is the author of Strip (, 2020), winner of the 2020 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. Her short poetry film, Dinner Party, premiered at Mizna’s Twin Cities Arab Film Festival in 2021. Her poems appear in Guernica, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Yale Review, and elsewhere.
"My altar travels easy. A pink rosary. Black tourmaline. Pictures of my grandparents. Print of a Pierrot. John the Baptist prayer cards."
Read "Homage to Kathleen Collins" by in our Summer '24 issue at the link in our bio.
Derrick Austin is the author of Tenderness (, 2021), winner of the 2020 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, and Trouble the Water (BOA Editions, 2016). His next collection, This Elegance, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in 2026.
Tonight is a full moon, and you should read "Cavalcade" by James McCorkle under its light. Find this poem in our Summer '24 issue at the link in our bio.
James McCorkle is the author of three collections of poetry: Evidences (–Honickman First Book Prize, 2004), The Subtle Bodies (, 2014), and In Time (Etruscan Press, 2020). He lives in Western New York and codirects the Africana Studies Program at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.
08/14/2024
"But for the sake of the dying, can I, / in this moment, borrow the voice of one who’s gone?"
Today we will be spending time with "The Repetition Is Appropriate Because What’s Being Denied Is Country" by . Read & listen to it at the link in our bio.
Saddiq Dzukogi is a Nigerian poet and assistant professor of English at Mississippi State University. He is the author of Your Crib, My Qibla (, 2021), selected by Carolyn Forché as winner of the 2021 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry and the 2022 Julie Suk Award. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships from the Nebraska Arts Council, the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, PEN America, and Ebedi International Residency. His poetry is featured in various magazines including Poetry, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Poetry London, Guernica, The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, and Prairie Schooner. Dzukogi lives and writes in Starkville, Mississippi.
"I often want to start these missives with a story / about something or someone dead." Read & listen to "The B-Sides of the Golden Record, Track Twenty-One: “Ozymandias” by Sumita Chakraborty at the link in our bio.
Sumita Chakraborty is a poet and a scholar. She is the author of the poetry collection Arrow@alicejamesbooks/, 2020) her current projects are a scholarly monograph titled Grave Dangers: Poetics and the Ethics of Death in the Anthropocene (under advance contract with ) and a second poetry collection, titled The B-Sides of the Golden Record. Chakraborty is assistant professor of English and creative writing at North Carolina State University.
Be the first to know and let us send you an email when The Kenyon Review posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
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
