In the heart of literature since 1939. journal | workshops | fellowships
linktr.ee/kenyonreview
09/01/2025
Send us your submissions by September 30th! In 2026, our magazine will feature folios on the following themes:
Alchemy
Invisible Cities
Precarity
Who Gets to Be American?
For both general and folio submissions, we accept poetry, fiction, essays, excerpts from larger works, and translations. We invite work that broadly interprets these themes. When you submit, you will have the option to identify your work for general submission or the themes. For full guidelines visit the link in our bio.
"Christensen wonders where art necessitates, our story of the world. Our. Our. Our. Do our jaws get numb from gulping our ours over & over—guppies in our freshwater aquariums?"
"Ecogodliness" by Felicia Zamora is a true stunner of a poem. What a gift it is to receive it—read and listen to it (we highly recommend both!) at the link in our bio.
's eight books of poetry include Murmuration Archives (Akrilica Series, , 2026), Interstitial Archaeology (University of Wisconsin Press Wisconsin Poetry Series, 2025), I Always Carry My Bones (winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize and Ohioana Book Award in Poetry), and Body of Render (winner of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award). Zamora has won the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, the C.P. Cavafy Prize, the Tomaž Šalamun Prize, and the Wabash Prize, and has received fellowships and residencies from CantoMundo, Ragdale, and Tin House . Her poems appear in Best American Poetry 2022, , , , The Kenyon Review, , Orion, , , and others. She is an associate professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and a poetry editor for .
Truly a phenomenal piece, "the nest of nothing" by Jasmine Reid exceeds boundaries, then runs laps around them. Wide in its scope and citation, deep in breadth and heart—read it here (link in bio).
is a trans: Atlantic poet for the people. She is the author of Interlocutor Goddess (forthcoming from , 2025), winner of the 2024 CAAPP Book Prize selected by Aracelis Girmay, and Deus ex Nigrum (Honeysuckle Press, 2020). An MFA graduate of Cornell University () and recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem (), the Jerome Foundation, and Poets House (). Reid was born and raised in Baltimore and is currently based in Brooklyn. She is an assistant professor at New York University.
08/15/2025
Dispensing wisdom with precision and clarity, "On the Traditional Ode to Melancholy" by Ed Roberson is today's required reading. Find it in our most recent issue—link in bio.
Ed Roberson is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Aquarium Works (Nion Editions, 2022), MPH and Other Road Poems (, 2021), and Asked What Has Changed (, 2021), a finalist for the . His varied career has included work in Pittsburgh steel mills, in an advertising graphics agency, as a limnologist’s assistant, and as a Rutgers University administrator. A chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the recipient of many honors, Roberson lives in Chicago, where he has taught at Northwestern University, Columbia College Chicago, and the University of Chicago.
"Everything I hear I keep. Inside me, loud, like rocks in a box." What should we say about "Language" by ? Other than read it. Other than—what a poem! Find it in our latest issue at the link below/in bio.
Leila Chatti s a Tunisian American poet and the author of Deluge ( , 2020) and four chapbooks. She is the winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize and the 2021 Luschei Prize for African Poetry and was longlisted for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award. Her second full-length collection, Wildness Before Something Sublime, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in fall 2025. Chatti’s honors include multiple Pushcart Prizes, grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Cleveland State University, where she was the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing and Publishing. Her poems appear in The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The Atlantic, Poetry magazine, and elsewhere. She is a Provost Fellow at the University of Cincinnati and teaches in Pacific University’s MFA program.
Selected by , read the winning piece of our 2024 Nonfiction Contest, "On Molting" by at the link in our bio. “At once taut and discursive,” writes Febos, “‘On Molting’ draws an outline of grief by sketching the contours of a life unmoored by loss but kept aloft by humor and the pleasures of memory and the mundane.”
Truly gorgeous prose—written with the utmost precision and care. Find it at the link in our bio.
Jessica Petrow-Cohen is a Pushcart Prize–nominated writer of creative nonfiction and the winner of the 2024 Kenyon Review Nonfiction Contest. Her senate testimony on behalf of same-sex marriage was published in and in former New Jersey State Senator Raymond J. Lesniak’s book, What’s Love Got to Do with It? Her writing has also appeared or is forthcoming in publications including , The Washington Post, , Fugue, and her Substack, Claiming Writerhood. Her work has been supported by The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the .
08/04/2025
"Whale Fall" by is a gorgeous, expansive, and generous story. We cannot get enough of it. Read it or have a listen in our latest issue. Link in bio.
Corinne Cordasco-Pak (she/her) holds an MFA from . Most recently, her work has appeared in Quarter Notes, Oyster River Pages, and Identity Theory, and she has received support from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. Codasco-Pak is a former fiction editor of Revolute, a member of the Wildcat Writing Group, and an interview contributor to Write or Die Magazine. She lives in Atlanta with her husband, their toddler, and two rescue dogs. Find her online .
Take a moment & spend some time with this staggering piece "If a Moment Becomes a Season, the Event Becomes a Condition" by .dingman from our latest issue! You can read & listen to it at the link in our bio.
Chelsea Dingman’s first book, Thaw (, 2017), won the National Poetry Series. Her second book, through a small ghost (UGA Press, 2020), won the Georgia Poetry Prize and her third collection is I, Divided (LSU Press, 2023). Dingman is a PhD candidate at the University of Alberta, and her current work draws on research supported by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
07/21/2025
We are thrilled to announce that the 2025 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement will be presented to Viet Thanh Nguyen (.thanh.nguyen.writer). This award honors careers of extraordinary literary achievement, recognizing individuals whose influence and importance have shaped the American literary landscape.
The Award will be given at a Gala on Friday, November 7, 2025 in The Mandarin Oriental in New York City.
Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer () won the for Fiction and was turned into an limited series. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim () and MacArthur Foundations, his most recent books are A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial; To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other; and the edited volume The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora.
Proceeds from this annual gala support vital programming throughout the year, including scholarships for writers to attend The Kenyon Review’s celebrated residential and online workshops.
"Well, I am sort of ashamed of my way of working, it’s so scrappy. I don’t need a room at all. I know people I admire enormously who have rooms that they go to each day, where they construct their poems like paintings; it’s imagination and literature at work together, and it’s amazing to see that process in action if you are the complete opposite. My room is the road."
We are deeply saddened by the death of F***y Howe earlier this month. In addition to teaching at , she appeared in our pages as a contributor and interviewee. She means so much to our community and the entire literary world. We are sharing this conversation with her from 2004 at the link below and in our bio.
The latest issue of The Kenyon Review is here! It is brimming with beauty and brilliance, and you can read it on our website today! This issue includes “The Milk Incident” by Easton Smith (), the winning entry of the 2024 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest judged by Idra Novey (). It also features the Cinema folio, which presents, among many stellar works, poetry by DeeSoul Carson () and Peter LaBerge (), fiction by Anna Chung and Torrey Paquette (), and nonfiction by Irene Bakola and Kelsey Ronan. The issue also includes poetry by Jenny Molberg (), Felicia Zamora (), and Leila Chatti (), fiction by Sevindj Nurkiyazova and Manasa Reddy, and nonfiction by Clint Martin and Jasmine Reid (@).
Complementing these works on the cover is art by Alia Ali.
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
