Read the winning piece of our 2025 Nonfiction Contest “Through the Mirror” by Jessie Cato selected by Lucy Ives.

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Jessica Petrow-Cohen

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 The New York Times 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 Brevity, The Washington Post, The Common, 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 Vermont Studio Center.

2024 Nonfiction Contest

Winter 2025

On Molting

By Jessica Petrow-Cohen

The Kenyon Review · “On Molting” by Jessica Petrow-Cohen There’s a girl I work with whose fiancée has cancer.  She says, “I’m sorry I was out last week, I found […]