April 2020

At a Time of Uncertainty

We’re here. The coronavirus pandemic has upended all of our lives. But it hasn’t diminished the need for art. On the contrary, the arts are more essential than ever. In this time of crisis, we want to assure you—readers and writers alike—that the joyful work of literary excellence goes on at the Kenyon Review. We’ll keep publishing the print journal. (Look for the May/June issue in a few weeks.) The web-based KROnline will continue to offer fresh writing every two weeks. On our website, you can find new blog postings, podcasts, conversations, and—every Friday—new book reviews. Connections via social media proliferate—we recently passed the 50,000 mark in Twitter followers. You can count on KR, on every one of our platforms. Social distancing has required some adjustments, of course. Our spring reading series will go on, but virtually, via Zoom—starting today, in fact! (See story below.) Because Kenyon College is finishing out the semester through distance learning, our KR Associates and Interns—the students who keep everything clicking along—are busily clicking from home, collaborating with one another and with the KR staff (also working remotely). Rather than abandon the writing workshops that they run for elementary and middle school students, for example, the Associates are posting prompts on the Resources for Teachers page of the KR website. As for our summer workshops, we’re assessing the feasibility of holding workshops on campus as planned. (See story below.) We hope to be able to make some decisions later this month, and we’ll be in touch with participants as well as instructors. Take good care, everyone. Keep reading, keep writing.

Miriam Grossman Wins Nonfiction Contest

Congratulations to Miriam Grossman, who has won KR’s second annual short nonfiction contest with the essay “2004.” Ira Sukrungruang, who judged the contest, praised the essay for its “little moments . . . the quiet tension, marked by fruit, the unspoken struggle between mother and daughter, between daughter and body, between body and its sense of visibility.” Sukrungruang, the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon, added: “Grossman writes about the reflection seen in the mirror of mothers and daughters; but, like most mirrors, in time they begin to crack.” Grossman, who writes fiction as well as nonfiction, is an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Virginia. She is currently working on a collection of linked stories that center on a Jewish American family and deal with issues of memory, physical frailty, and intergenerational change. As our contest winner, Grossman will receive a scholarship to attend the KR Writers Workshop, and her essay will be published in the Mar/Apr 2021 Kenyon Review. Also appearing in that issue will be the pieces by the two contest runners-up, Stella Li (“Mouthwater”) and Mary O. Parker (“Current and Eddies”). Click here to read Sukrungruang’s comments on the winning essays.

Zoom In Today: Spring Reading Series Goes Virtual

File under “lemons-to-lemonade.” Because of Covid-19, we can’t gather with authors in the cozy Cheever Room on the Kenyon campus. But we’ll still offer a full schedule of readings, via Zoom—and we start today, April 7, at 4:30 p.m. EDT with a reading by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo. The series continues with Kyle Swenson (April 14), Molly McCully Brown and Susannah Nevison (April 20), and Oliver de la Paz (April 21). As with our in-person events, the readings will include a time for questions, and we’ll provide a link to the KR Bookshop, where you can buy the authors’ books. No, a reading-via-Zoom can’t be as intimate, but you can make it cozy in your own way (think: armchair, beverage of choice.) Please join us live-online! Click here for the schedule of readings and instructions on how to link to them online.

Writing Workshops: Status Report

If you have enrolled in or applied to one of our summer workshops, we know that you have questions. Given the uncertainties surrounding the current health emergency, we are evaluating the feasibility of offering the workshops on the Kenyon campus in June and July, as planned. For the Young Writers Workshop and the Young Science Writers Workshop, we are postponing our admissions decision date to April 10. If the situation changes before then, we will let you know via email and on the KR website. For the Writers Workshops, including the Writers Workshop for Teachers, we plan to announce a decision by April 15, via email, on how we’ll proceed. (If we have to cancel, we will refund all deposits.) We encourage you to check the website for updated information. Know that, whatever happens this summer, we are committed to sustaining these workshops, which so many writers find so valuable.

New in KR Podcasts

KR Fellow Molly McCully Brown converses with poet Analicia Sotelo about poetry’s ability to address the rhetoric of power, produce empathy, and create a space for mystery without dogma. Listen to it!

From the KR Blog: “A Crowd-Sourced List of Poetry Titles”

BY ROSEBUD BEN-ONI

March 13, 2020

I often think about this space here on the Kenyon Review. I think of the essays I’ve written here, the readers I’ve met because of those pieces, and the poets and writers with whom I’ve shared this space. But right now I’m thinking of the many poets who are missing or will miss out on book launches, readings, signings, and celebrations because of the global health crisis. I’m thinking about community and kindness, and so I hope this list will spark some joy, though it’s not a replacement for those events so many of us are missing. Read Ben-Oni’s list of more than 300 recent and upcoming poetry collections, originally crowd-sourced on Twitter.

APRIL 2020
CONTENTS

We’re Here
Nonfiction Contest Winner
Virtual Reading Series
Writers Workshops
KR Podcasts
From the Blog

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