May 2018

Laura Roque Wins 2018 KR Short Fiction Contest

Congratulations to Laura Roque, winner of the eleventh annual Kenyon Review Short Fiction contest! Roque’s story, “Dientes for Dentures,” was selected from 525 entries by judge Melinda Moustakis, who praised the story for its “feverdream” prose and for the way it brilliantly encapsulated “an entire novel of experiences.” It will be published in the Jan/Feb 2019 issue of the Kenyon Review, and Roque will receive a scholarship to attend the KR Writers Workshop. Click here for the full list of runners-up and honorable mentions along with Melinda Moustakis’s comments on the winning works.

May/June KR Arrives, with Fourth Annual Nature-Writing Feature

The new issue of the Kenyon Review ushers in spring with “Nature’s Nature,” a special section devoted to writing on the “natural.” This is KR’s fourth annual nature-writing feature, reflecting the fact that writers continue to see environmental issues as compelling and critical. Poetry Editor David Baker, who assembled the section, refers to this installment as “Nature’s (Human) Nature,” explaining that the poems and essays here focus in particular on “the place of the human in nature.” Read David Baker’s thoughts on the section and introduction to “Nature’s Nature.”

KR Welcomes Keith Wilson as Poetry Fellow

We’re delighted to announce that Keith Wilson will join the KR family and Kenyon’s literary community for the 2018-19 academic year as a KR fellow in poetry. Author of the forthcoming Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love (Copper Canyon Press), Wilson will teach a course at Kenyon while pursuing his own creative work and participating in a variety of KR programs. Read the rest of this article.

Where Plays (Including Yours) Take Flight

Playwrights Horizons will launch its 2018-19 season this August with I Was Most Alive with You, by Craig Lucas. But as he anticipates opening night in New York, Lucas looks back gratefully to a summer week in 2015 in Gambier, Ohio, where the play evolved as part of the Kenyon Playwrights Conference. “Kenyon was extraordinary,” says Lucas, who was commissioned to write the play in conjunction with the Conference. “Everybody involved in the first reading … was incredibly useful—observant, honest, questioning, hopeful. It was in fact one of the two or three best experiences I’ve ever had with a new play.” Whether you’re an experienced playwright or a relative newcomer, the KR Playwrights Conference offers inspiring workshops, an energizing community of kindred spirits, and the chance to hone your craft under the guidance of professionals with major theater companies. The 2018 Playwrights Conference, June 10-16, still has places available. Click here to learn more and apply.

Resistance, Change, Survival: Looking Back, and Ahead

Launching this online feature last September, KR fellows Jaquira Díaz and Margaree Little wrote: “In the aftermath of the 2016 election, we are called to look more closely at our art…. What writing is meaningful, now, to read and write?” Twelve writers took on this question, directly and indirectly, in poetry and prose, through deeply personal visions. Díaz and Little bring the feature to a close with reflections on the value of resistance, and on the writing that made this series a touchstone for writers and readers alike. Read the “Resistance” afterword.”

New in KR Podcasts

Javier Zamora, author of the poetry collection Unaccompanied (Copper Canyon Press) and currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, talks with Andrew Grace of the Kenyon English faculty about immigration, advocating for undocumented poets, and what Salvadoran poets Americans should be reading.
Listen to it!

From KROnline: “(More) News From Poems: Investigative / Documentary / Social Poetics On The Tenth Anniversary Of The Publication Of ‘From Reznikoff To Public Enemy’”

BY PHILIP METRES

Though documentary poems sometimes echo and mimic legal discourse, historical accounts, or victim testimonies, what makes them vital is how they call upon the ancient and primal role of the poet in the community. . . . For me, the best documentary poems draw us back to the headwaters of poetry, where tribal elders, griots, troubadours, holy fools, tricksters, medicine men, witches, and shamans all do their work, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.
Read the essay.

From the KR Blog: “Against Relatability”

BY AATIF RASHID

April 13, 2018

But if we start to point the mirror at only ourselves and use the idea of “relatability” as the primary metric for judging the value of a work, as many who uncritically praise the Instapoets have been doing, then we’ll end up severely limiting the kind of art we find valuable—and as a result not only will we become unable to appreciate many past works from now-unfamiliar cultures, we’ll also start to dismiss contemporary works by minority voices that might differ from our hegemonic values as too “unrelatable.” Read the essay.

A Micro-Conversation with Jamie Quatro

Quatro’s story, “Dirt Man,” appears in the Mar/Apr 2018 issue of the Kenyon Review.

What was your original impetus for writing “Dirt Man”?

Our house is actually built on a privy that dates back to the Civil War. The kids and I used to spend hours after school digging in a particular spot in our backyard. Now we have a nice collection of late-1800s snake oil medicine bottles…. One spring a few years ago we heard that a beloved woman in our community … was diagnosed with ALS. I started thinking about what it would be like to watch someone suffer in that way. I was also re-reading Augustine’s Confessions and thinking about modes of confession. Medicine bottles, ALS, confession—I suppose those three elements collided, and combusted. Read the rest of the interview.

MAY 2018
CONTENTS
Short Fiction Contest
May/June 2018
KR Fellow Announced
Playwrights Conference
Resistance, Change,
   Survival
KR Podcast
From KROnline
From the Blog
KR Conversations

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