April 2019

Anna Hartford Wins Nonfiction Contest

Congratulations to Anna Hartford, who has won KR’s inaugural short nonfiction contest with “Hello Fridge”—an essay about a refrigerator “but really about the beginning and end of a relationship,” noted KR Nonfiction Editor Geeta Kothari, who judged the contest. “I loved the completeness of the essay, and Anna Hartford’s skillful use of a single, everyday object to tell a story about love and loss,” wrote Kothari. A writer and researcher based in Cape Town, South Africa, Hartford will receive a scholarship to attend the 2019 Writers Workshop, and her essay will be published in the Mar/Apr 2020 issue of the Kenyon Review. Also appearing in that issue will be the pieces by the two contest runners-up, KT Sparks (“Saving Luna”) and Benjamin Garcia (“The Great Glass Closet”). Click here to read Geeta Kothari’s comments on the winning works.

Grappling with Injustice: KR Fellows Launch a New Project

“How do we, as artists, engage with a world that threatens so many of the bodies of its least protected?” This question lies at the heart of “Proof Casts a Shadow,” a project launched last month by KR Fellows Misha Rai and Keith S. Wilson. Running through August, the project will bring new work from diverse authors to KROnline every month: prose and poetry that grapples with issues of injustice, such as policies threatening migrants, undocumented peoples, women, and trans people. Each piece, moreover, will respond to other pieces of writing, contemporary or classic, thus creating a dialogue among texts and writers. “Proof Casts a Shadow” (the name comes from a poem by Rita Dove) was conceived in the activist spirit of “Resistance, Change, Survival,” the 2017-18 series organized by then-KR fellows Jaquira Díaz and Margaree Little. The first two pieces presented by the new project are “A Pretty Rough Day,” an essay by Wilson, and two poems by Grace Shuyi Liew, “The Use of Lyricism” and “Kuala Lumpur.” To read these pieces and the introduction to the series, click here.

Why We Chose It

BY KATHERINE M. HEDEEN, TRANSLATIONS EDITOR

“Four Poems from Frayer,” by Marie-Andrée Gill and translated from French by Kristen Renee Miller, appears in the Mar/Apr 2019 issue of the Kenyon Review.

These brief lyrical bursts by Marie-Andrée Gill, born in the Ilnu community in Mashteuiatsh (Quebec), and translated from the French by Kristin Renee Miller, expand our notions of who does poetry and how. First off, in a very general sense, the poems expose us to a voice hidden behind a persistent othering, one that insists on binaries like civilized/savage, rational/irrational, and intellect/emotion, and consequently, a voice that many readers may not be aware even exists. Read the rest of “Why We Chose It.”

Summer Writers Workshops: Last Chance

There’s still time—but just barely—for you to challenge and transform your sense of writerly possibilities this summer through a KR Writers Workshop. Places are still available, especially in our Writers Workshop for Teachers and in The Translator’s Voice, both running from July 7 to 13. To get a good sense of the spirit animating the translation workshop, read this month’s “Why We Chose It” (above), by Katherine M. Hedeen, one of the workshop teachers and a KR translations editor. Learn more about the KR Summer Writers Workshops.

Poem in Your Pocket: The Delight Returns

April showers poems onto the Kenyon campus, as KR and its Student Associates celebrate Poem in Your Pocket Day. This year we mark the occasion with readings by two phenomenal poets: on April 24, Chen Chen, the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities; and on April 25, Tommy Pico, author of IRL, Nature Poem, and Junk. Also, if you happen to be in Gambier on April 24, you will encounter poems festooning and fluttering from every imaginable surface, as the Student Associates enact their annual literary rite of spring by printing snatches of verse on strips of paper and decorating the entire village with them. For a day—and maybe more?—poetic magic is unavoidable. For details on the April 24 and 25 readings, click here.

KR Remembers W.S. Merwin (1927-2019)

“His poems are among the landmarks in all of American poetry,” writes KR Poetry Editor David Baker, “but more than this, the breadth and generosity of his translations, his transcendent prose, his hope and hands-in-the-dirt ecological stewardship, his soulful presence: there is no greater example of what a poet is, to me, than William Merwin.” Merwin, who published in the Kenyon Review over more than five decades, died on March 15. KR has created an online tribute to this hugely accomplished and influential figure in American letters, including not only an appreciation by Baker but also links to several of Merwin’s poems, to poems written in his memory, and to a long interview conducted in 2010, the year that Merwin—Poet Laureate of the United States at the time—received the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement. To read the tribute, click here.

AWP Snapshots

KR staff had a blast at AWP 2019 celebrating eighty years of the Kenyon Review with John Crowe Ransom-themed cupcakes, and hosting an eightieth anniversary reading featuring Dana Levin, David Lynn, Misha Rai, Tess Taylor, and Keith S. Wilson.

New in KR Podcasts

Best-selling author R. O. Kwon talks with Kenyon Review Editor at Large Katharine Weber about Kwon’s timely novel, The Incendiaries, as well as about the many paths to becoming a writer and the multiple forms a writer’s life takes. Listen to it!
Also, Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Jew in the Lotus and The History of Last Night’s Dream, among many other books, speaks with KR Writers Workshop Fellow Jessica Kinnison about the primary imagination, the American worship of honing one’s craft, and writing from soul versus writing from persona. Listen to it!

From the KR Blog: “Making the Familiar Strange: A Conversation with Wendy Chin-Tanner”

BY CAROLINE HAGOOD

March 18, 2019

The 3×3 or trisyllabic tercet form that I developed has a recursive quality to it, and that seemed to align itself with similar patterns that I explore on a micro and macro level in, for example, nature, astronomy, and most certainly in psychology. It’s a natural human tendency to ruminate on the past, and we are destined to repeat our patterns. Our best hope is to tweak those patterns and spiral up. I wanted the backward gaze in these poems [in Anyone Will Tell You] to reflect this tendency in our inward gaze.
Read the entire conversation.

Behind the Scenes: KR Associate of the Month

This month, KR intern Tyler Raso talks with Charlotte Freccia ’19, from Columbus, Ohio, an English major with a creative writing emphasis in fiction. She’s one of the Kenyon Review’s social media interns, and in this interview, which took place shortly before the College’s spring break in early March, she discusses the necessity of making radical revisions, the importance of self-advocacy for one’s work, and writing a narrative that “walks a lot of lines.” Read the interview.

APRIL 2019
CONTENTS
Short Nonfiction Contest
Proof Casts a Shadow
Why We Chose It
Writers Workshops
Poem in Your Pocket Day
Remembering Merwin
AWP Snapshots
KR Podcasts
From the Blog
KR Associate Interview

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