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The new issue of The Kenyon Review is here! Follow the link in our bio to read:Jessie Cato’s remarkable piece on the non...
05/19/2026

The new issue of The Kenyon Review is here! Follow the link in our bio to read:

Jessie Cato’s remarkable piece on the nonlinearity of grief, “Through the Mirror,” the winning entry of the 2025 Kenyon Review Nonfiction Contest judged by Lucy Ives.

A mesmerizing collection of poems including work by Patrick Rosal, Julia Kolchinsky, Victoria Chang, and Maya C. Popa

Fiction by Kate Tooley, T.C. Boyle, Joan Larkin, and Carly Berwick

Nonfiction by Emily Mathis, Kuln’Zu Zucule, and Patrick Autréaux translated by Tobias Ryan

In our Reviews section read Claire Oleson on Dogs by C. Mallon and Daniel Spielberger on Woo Woo by Ella Baxer

The Invisible Cities folio features new work by Morgan English, Jung Young Moon translated by Tae Rang Kim, Alexis Zanghi, and Jaque Gorelick.

This cover features Launch Pads (2021) by Ivan David Ng.

https://kenyonreview.org/journal/winter-2026/

"These days my patience is skeletal and my rage lurid. You know Freud was wrong about the Gorgon."A deft & evocative pie...
05/13/2026

"These days my patience is skeletal and my rage lurid. You know Freud was wrong about the Gorgon."

A deft & evocative piece, "Un caso clínico" by Daisy Elizeth Magallanes is from our latest. Read it at the link below.

Daisy Elizeth Magallanes (she/they) is the proud Chicana daughter of migrant parents, Emerita and Ramiro Magallanes, from the sacred Caxcan land of Tlaltenango, Zacatecas. She is a Pushcart-nominated writer, translator, and educator whose work has been featured in Acid Verse, Brevity, Black Warrior Review, Brooklyn & Boyle, Huizache, and Hypertext Review. Their poetry has been internationally exhibited in CDMX. They are the managing editor at Huizache.

https://kenyonreview.org/piece/un-caso-clinico/

"Xinyue Huang’s poems demonstrate the talents of a writer whose subjects, diction, and formal range cohere into an evolv...
05/12/2026

"Xinyue Huang’s poems demonstrate the talents of a writer whose subjects, diction, and formal range cohere into an evolved, dynamic body of work."

—Diane Seuss, 2025 KR Poetry Contest Judge

Read Huang's winning poems in our latest issue.

Xinyue Huang is a bilingual poet who writes in English and Chinese currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at NYU. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2023 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize.

https://kenyonreview.org/piece/my-coworker-thought-i-didnt-know-what-a-lox-bagel-was-so-he-said-to-me-its-just-like-sushi/

"Decades after first reading Adrienne Rich’s classic poem “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” in which the poem’s subject labors o...
04/29/2026

"Decades after first reading Adrienne Rich’s classic poem “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” in which the poem’s subject labors over a piece of embroidery, suppressing the tigers alive in her, I was delighted to discover this portrait of mother embodied as tiger in Qiaorui Zhang’s winning poem. Formally, this contrapuntal “Tiger Mom” illustrates the binary of the dedicated wife and mother: Her domestication and ferocity are one and the same. In this manner, her instructions in English and Chinese are direct, lifesaving commands shouted in the battlefield of a kitchen where a man “hurls the plate.” “Tiger Mom” is a love poem for the mother who makes sacrifices so her children will have the option to “never return,” subverting the assumption she will become a “nameless tale.” This is writer who would not devastate us so if she did not have remarkable formal chops."

—Cate Marvin, 2025 Patricia Grodd Judge

Read this year's winning poem at the link below!

Qiaorui (Sherry) Zhang is a first-generation immigrant living in Massachusetts. She is a Scholastic Art and Writing Awards medalist, and her work has been recognized by The New York Times. Outside of writing, Sherry plays the flute and enjoys eating ramen.

https://kenyonreview.org/piece/tiger-mom/

"I love the narrative lurch of runner-up “Neglect from a Woman with Blue Breasts” by Isabelle Cox-Garleanu as it swings ...
04/25/2026

"I love the narrative lurch of runner-up “Neglect from a Woman with Blue Breasts” by Isabelle Cox-Garleanu as it swings back and forth between its lines, leaning into the ways of the woman whose lessons are neglect. It’s smart and sad and so freaking wise. The poem’s lineation enforces the sense of a specifically adolescent experience of limbo, with its authoritarian figures handing out easy advice while disregarding the recipient’s intelligence. This is a writer who is endowed with an enviable capacity for intuition."

—Cate Marvin, 2025 Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers Judge

Read "Neglect from a Woman with Blue Breasts" in our latest at the link below.

Isabelle Cox-Garleanu speaks four languages: Japanese, French, English, and her favorite, Poetry. Her writing has been recognized by the Bridport Prize, the Cambridge Centre for International Research, the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, YoungArts, the Bow Seat Ocean Awareness Contest, the French American Cultural Society, and the Wednesday Club of St. Louis, among other organizations. She is also the founder of Pen Power Poetry (penpowerpoetry.org), where she organizes and leads free, fun poetry workshops to boost literacy rates in St. Louis.

https://kenyonreview.org/piece/neglect-from-a-woman-with-blue-breasts/

"Runner-up “Prayers to the Buddha in My Costco Jar of Vaseline” by Ryan Li is chock-full of dreamy, lyrical associations...
04/22/2026

"Runner-up “Prayers to the Buddha in My Costco Jar of Vaseline” by Ryan Li is chock-full of dreamy, lyrical associations that pull the reader into a relationship between the speaker and an individual with whom they will eventually refuse to enter into congress. It’s the moment of refusal that so delights me: the speaker’s defiance, their renouncing of God, that allows me as reader to walk right up a red velvet corridor into their heart. This is a writer who demonstrates undeniable promise.'

— Cate Marvin, 2025 Patricia Grodd Judge

Read this poem in its entirety in our latest issue at the link below!

Ryan Li is a student based in New York. Their work has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and is forthcoming in Vellichor Literary. When they’re not writing, they can be found playing volleyball or roaming the CVS candy section.

https://kenyonreview.org/piece/prayers-to-the-buddha-in-my-costco-jar-of-vaseline/

We're excited to welcome Richie Hofmann and Jon Pineda on Kenyon College's campus tomorrow for a special reading! If you...
04/15/2026

We're excited to welcome Richie Hofmann and Jon Pineda on Kenyon College's campus tomorrow for a special reading! If you're in the area, we hope to see you there.

Richie Hofmann’s new book of poems is The Bronze Arms. He is the recipient of a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2025 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His poetry appears in two previous collections, A Hundred Lovers (2022) and Second Empire (2015), and in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Yale Review. His honors include the Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University.

Jon Pineda is the author of six books: two novels, one memoir, and three poetry collections. His work has twice received the Library of Virginia Literary Award (one for fiction and one for poetry). Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in the New England Review, Five Points, Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. He lives in Virginia with his family and teaches at William & Mary.

Richie's latest collection of poems The Bronze Arms released earlier this year:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/797430/the-bronze-arms-by-richie-hofmann/

We're very excited to have the inimitable ZZ Packer here at Kenyon College TODAY for a reading happening shortly. ZZ rec...
04/14/2026

We're very excited to have the inimitable ZZ Packer here at Kenyon College TODAY for a reading happening shortly. ZZ recently had a story appear in our Fall 2025 issue—“What's Done Is Done,” and you can read it at the link below.

ZZ Packer’s stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Story, Ploughshares, GRANTA, Zoetrope All-Story, Best American Short Stories 2000, Best American Short Stories 2003 and 100 Years of The Best American Short Stories.

She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the American Academy of Berlin Prize. Her collection of stories Drinking Coffee Elsewhere won the Commonwealth First Fiction Award, an ALEX Award and was a National Book Award 5 under 35 winner.

ZZ Packer is editor of New Short Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 2008. She is at work on a novel about the Reconstruction and Buffalo Soldiers entitled The Thousands, an excerpt of which appeared in The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40 Fiction Issue” and The 1619 Project.

She has taught creative writing at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, The Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, Tulane University, Stanford University and Johns Hopkins.

https://kenyonreview.org/piece/whats-done-is-done/

Tomorrow is the LAST DAY to apply for our Summer Online Workshop. In this workshop, you'll work with three different fac...
04/09/2026

Tomorrow is the LAST DAY to apply for our Summer Online Workshop. In this workshop, you'll work with three different faculty in one genre for an entire week in June. Today, we're shouting out three of our amazing Poetry Faculty: Lisa Low, Brad Richard, & Emily Jungmin Yoon!

Apply here:

https://kenyonreview.org/event/summer-online-writers-workshops/

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