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11/25/2025
“The girls scatter / where the sky falls at their feet.”
We're all in that end of the year hustle. Take a moment and spend some time with "Midwest at Sunset" by Clara Trippe in our latest issue. Let the poem find you where you are. Link in bio.
Clara Trippe (she/they) is a Midwest poet who grew up on occupied Ojibwe land. They received their MFA from the University of Oregon, and they are currently a grant writer for Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. You can find her work featured in The Rumpus, Terrain.org, Heavy Feather Review, Crab Creek Review, and more. Wherever they are, they would like to go home. You can find her as on Instagram.
On Wednesday, December 3 from 6–9 p.m., Riverhead Books will host their holdiay party at The Brooklyn Brewery. We're so grateful to be the beneficiary for this event. Beer, books, baked goods by Riverhead authors, fancy raffle prizes, and a festive photo booth all await you for a $10 donation at the door.
As a nonprofit organization, we rely on generous support to ensure our journal and writing workshops thrive.
11/19/2025
Attention high school teachers and young writers: The Kenyon Review's Winter Online Writing Workshops are a great opportunity for current sophomores, juniors, and seniors to discover their strengths and explore new possibilities for their writing. Unlike many other workshops that focus on providing critical feedback, these workshops inspire writers to take creative risks and generate new work in the company of peers and a supportive instructor.
International students are encouraged to apply! Review application guidelines and apply before December 15 by following the link in our bio. Comment ✨ and we'll DM you a direct link to the application.
Young writers—there is just under one month left to get your applications in for our Winter Online Writing Workshops. We have a generous offering of courses including these three:
Inciting Poetry: Writing with Revolutionary Lineage Towards Revolutionary Futures with Aishvarya Arora
Hide and Seek and the Elegy with Corinne Dekkers
Translating Memory with Julia Grawemeyer
We are accepting applications for our four-month long Developmental Editing Fellowship for Emerging Writers. The Fellowship involves one-on-one mentorship by an experienced editor on the KR team. Fellows can expect to have monthly hour-long conversations with a Developmental Editor, who will provide feedback and suggestions on a book draft. Follow the link in our bio to see all application guidelines and previous fellows.
This is how you want to start your weekend—by reading "The Trouble with Brown People" by Pritha Bhattacharyya. Find it in our latest issue at the link in our bio.
Pritha Bhattacharyya is a fiction writer who received her PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston and her MFA from Boston University. Her work appears in The Southern Review and Ecotone and has received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Key West Literary Seminar, Willapa Bay AiR, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hedgebrook, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, Inprint, the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, and elsewhere. Bhattacharyya is a 2024–25 postdoctoral fellow and Inprint Writer-in-Residence at the McGovern Center for Humanities and Ethics in Houston.
Part two of our Poetry Faculty for the upcoming Winter Online Writing Workshops for Adult Writers! Unlike other writing workshops, these focus on generating new work. Now is your opportunity to take creative risks with the support of an amazing faculty.
Philip Metres is a poet and the author of thirteen books, most recently the essay collection Dispatches from the Land of Erasure (, 2025). His books of poetry include Fugitive/Refuge (, 2024), Shrapnel Maps (Copper Canyon, 2020), The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (University of Michigan, 2018), Sand Opera (, 2015), and I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (Cleveland State, 2015).
Anna V. Q. Ross is a poet and critic and the author of the poetry collections Flutter, Kick (), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award and Julia Ward Howe Award in Poetry, and named a 2023 Best New Poetry Book by the New York Public Library; If a Storm (Anhinga Press), winner of the Robert Dana-Anhinga Award; and the chapbook Figuring (Bull City Press). She holds an MFA from Columbia University, and her work has been supported by fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Community of Writers.
Paul Tran is the author of the debut poetry collection, All the Flowers Kneeling, published by Penguin. Their work appears in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. They earned their BA in History from Brown University and MFA in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis. Winner of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, Stanford University, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Paul is an Assistant Professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Our Poetry Faculty for the upcoming Winter Online Writing Workshops are showstoppers. Here is the first half of the faculty: Dan Beachy-Quick, Marianne Chan, and Tyree Daye. Stay tuned for the second half or visit our website to see the entire faculty and send in an application. The deadline is only a month away.
Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist, and translator. He is the author of many poetry collections including, most recently, Arrows (, 2020). His critical work includes How to Draw A Circle: On Reading and Writing (, Poets on Poetry Series, 2024), Of Silence & Song (, 2017), and literary reveries on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and John Keats. Translation work includes pre-Socratic philosophy, The Thinking Root, a collection of early lyric poetry, Stone-Garland (Milkweed Editions), and Wind—Mountain—Oak, a translation of Sappho.
Marianne Chan grew up in Stuttgart, Germany, and Lansing, Michigan. After she earned her B.A. in English from Michigan State University, she went on to study poetry at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she earned her MFA. She earned her Ph.D. in Creative Writing & Literature from the University of Cincinnati in 2023. Marianne is the author of All Heathens (Sarabande Books, 2020), which was the winner of the 2021 GLCA New Writers Award in Poetry, the 2021 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry, and the 2022 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for Outstanding Achievement. In 2024, she published her second collection Leaving Biddle City (Sarabande Books), which was the winner of a 2025 ALA Notable Book Award.
Tyree Daye was raised in Youngsville, North Carolina. He is the author of the poetry collections a little bump in the earth (forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press, 2024), Cardinal (, 2020), and River Hymns (, 2017), winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. A Fellow and a Palm Beach Poetry Festival Langston Hughes Fellow, Daye is the recipient of a Award, a Kate Tufts Award finalist, and a 2021 Paterson Prize finalist.
Applications for our Winter Online Writing Workshops for Adult Writers are open until December 12th. We have a full rockstar line up of faculty, and today we are shouting out our Creative Nonfiction Faculty: Khadijah Queen, Angelique Stevens, and Grace Talusan!
All workshop details and guidelines can be found at the link in our bio.
Sophomores and juniors in high school: through the end of November, we are accepting one poem for The Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers! This year's judge is the inimitable Krysten Hill.
The poems by the winner and runners-up will be published in The Kenyon Review, and the winner receives a full scholarship to a Kenyon Review Young Writers workshop. Find full guidelines on our website or at the link in our bio.
Krysten Hill is the author of How Her Spirit Got Out (Aforementioned Productions, 2016), which received the 2017 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. Her work has been featured in , , , Up the Staircase Quarterly, Muzzle, PANK, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Winter Tangerine Review and elsewhere. The recipient of the 2016 St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award and 2020 Mass Cultural Council Poetry Fellowship, she received her MFA in poetry from .
Our Gala is underway, and we're excited to come together as a community to raise funds to support writers and celebrate .thanh.nguyen.writer's achievements. If you cannot be here with us, you can still show support of our cause for the evening.
Donations from the Gala fund scholarships for writers of all ages to attend either our young or adult writers workshops. These scholarships support writers all over the world, so they can travel to and challenge themselves to exceed their own expectations. Writers have singular, transformative experiences at these workshops, and we need your help to continue providing access to those who need it most. Make a gift to support a writer today by following the link in our bio.
On Friday November 7, we will present the 2025 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement to .thanh.nguyen.writer at our annual gala. All donations through the Gala fund scholarships for young and adult writers to attend residential and online programming. As a nonprofit organization, we need your support to keep the journal and our writing workshops thriving.
The Kenyon Review has been in the heart of literature since 1939. Help sustain the work we do by making a donation today. To learn more about the gala or show your support follow the link in our bio.
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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
