September 2013

Carl Phillips to Receive 2013 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement

The Kenyon Review has selected Carl Phillips as the winner of the 2013 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement.

Phillips is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Silverchest (2013) and Double Shadow (2011), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Phillips will accept the Kenyon Review award in New York City on November 7. On November 9, he will deliver the Denham Sutcliffe Memorial Lecture at Kenyon College as part of the Kenyon Review Literary Festival.

Why We Chose it: Because Lucille Clifton’s Collected Work is a Big Book

By Kascha Semonovitch, Book Review Editor

Some books are big in global history, some in national history, and some in personal history. Lucille Clifton’s work is big in all of those categories. That’s why I chose Rachel Richardson’s review of it for KROnline and, I think, why Richardson chose it herself.

Applications Now Open For KR Fellowships

The Kenyon Review has begun accepting applications for its KR Fellowships. These two-year post-graduate positions are intended for creative writers who have already completed the MFA or PhD degree and are seeking time to develop as writers, teachers, and editors. Two fellows, a poet and a prose writer, will arrive in Gambier, Ohio in August 2014. Applications will be accepted through October 1st.

KR Reading Period Begins September 15th

The Kenyon Review will begin accepting submissions online on September 15, 2013 and the submissions period will continue through January 15, 2014. Short fiction, poetry, drama, essays, and translations will be accepted for both the magazine and KROnline from a single pool of submissions.

Check out KR’s Fall Issue!

KR’s Fall 2013 issue hits the newsstands Sept. 11th and features exceptional new work by T. C. Boyle, Melissa Kwasny, Roger Desy, Lee Sharkey, Brenda Hillman, Austin Smith, and many more. Grab a copy today! Or check out our Kindle Extended Edition! Subscribe and get the full KR issue for only .99 cents a month! Or purchase single issues for only $3.99.

How We Wrote It: The Reach of a Root

Successful literary collaborations are fascinating and rare. Recently, we published Micaela Maftei and Laura Tansley’s story “The Reach of a Root” on KRO. As part of our ongoing interest in exploring the writer’s craft, we thought it would be fun to learn more about their collaboration. You can read their story below. —Eds.

By Micaela Maftei and Laura Tansley

Fast, eager, a little breathless. Our aim was to write a story about adolescence, about the stretching and tense time before adulthood, calling out a number of stories that we shared with each other, memories and ideas and half-scratched-out notions of what it meant to grow up that we remembered feeling and believing, a theme we have pursued.

The Reach of a Root

by Micaela Maftei and Laura Tansley

Clare got caught looking at her cunt. A mirror between her legs, her white knickers rolled down around her knees, in the shower block of the girls’ changing rooms. Ruby stood and stared and left the kit bag she’d forgotten swinging on a peg in her wake. She wrote a long letter to Lisa about it in form, an itemized list of the irregularities: the place she chose, the look on her face, the Chanel compact tilted at an awkward angle.

Click here to finish reading this story.
KROnline is the online complement of The Kenyon Review. New fiction, essays, poetry, and reviews are published on a biweekly basis. Check back often to read some of the most cutting-edge material you’ll find anywhere on the web. Click here to see our latest offering.

The Kenyon Review, New Series, Summer/Fall 1997, Vol. XIX, No. 3-4

September First

The sky turned over sometime in the night.
While it happened I slept
under a quilt of geese. My throat

felt their beaks utter
a parched good-bye to the dulled gold
surfaces of summer.

Return of the Gospel of Pen and Paper

August 16, 2013 — Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers

I spent a good part of this summer teaching in The Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop, a two-week creative writing program geared towards talented high school students from all over the country, as well as other parts of the world. Unlike most of the college writing classes I teach—where most of our class times are spent talking about how to write, discussing the writings of others, and critiquing student writings—the curriculum of the Young Writers’ Workshop revolves around the actual act of writing during class sessions, asking everyone to produce a piece or work—or at least the foundations of one—on the spot. Instructors are not exempt from this requirement. We teachers respond to the same prompts as our students. A slave to my solitary writing habits, I found this requirement a real challenge, especially in the first days. I’m not used to sharing anything I’ve written until it’s already marinated on my hard drive for quite some time.

A Micro-Interview with Jamaal May

May’s poems appeared in the Summer 2013 issue of The Kenyon Review.

Is there a story behind your KR poems? What was the hardest part about writing them?

The challenge of “The Sky, Now Black With Birds” was inherent in its subject matter. I don’t always go into a poem wanting to address a specific issue. I’m usually led by language and discover what’s nagging me through the process of arguing with a draft. The E.M. Forster adage, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” definitely applies to this process. When I want to address something specific, the “this-should-be-a-poemness” of a subject actually makes the process more troublesome.

Contents Sept. 2013
KR Literary Award
Why We Chose It
KR Fellowships
Reading Period Opens
Fall Issue Preview
How We Wrote It
From KROnline
From the Archives
From the Blog
KR Conversations

The Fall Issue,
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