Upon moving in for the Kenyon Review Young Writers program, you’ll find that you and your roommate have many things in common. You’ll share a facility with words, a knack for scribbling in the margins of things, a sense that you have exciting work to do, that here you can do it. You’ll find something else too: that there’s much you and your roommate don’t have in common. You’ll come from different states, different countries. You’ll speak with regional accents that make English sound like a foreign language. Your roommate’s parents, unlike your parents, will not be librarians or lawyers or business owners. To make a long story short, you and your roommate will be very different people. And yes, you will likely be of a different race. This is intentional and crucial. This is a big part of the experience you are about to have. Be open. It counts.
Last month, KR welcomed young writers from over forty states and several foreign countries. Thirty percent of our enrolled students attended with the help of full or partial scholarships. Of the total enrollment, another thirty percent (but not necessarily the same thirty percent) identified as an ethnic minority.
To highlight the diversity of the program is, we hope, not to make a selling point or posture politically. Instead, we hope to celebrate the program’s natural evolution. It’s a virtue to celebrate, really–that ninety high school students from all across the country choose to write together and befriend each other in a village in rural Ohio. Greater student diversity has led, we believe, to a program of greater creative vitality. The sheer variety of voices yields and continues to yield work of an insightful and generous, candid and courageous spirit. There is more to learn. And exactly what students learn is changing, growing, and becoming more complicated.
On the first day of Young Writers, your instructors will ask something of you: be open–to the experience, to what you can learn about yourself as a person and writer. The challenge has never been more crucial to the program, and the rewards have never been so great.