May 2019

Daphne Palasi Andreades Wins Short Fiction Contest

Congratulations to Daphne Palasi Andreades, winner of the twelfth annual Kenyon Review Short Fiction contest! Andreades, an MFA student at Columbia University whose work often explores issues such as diaspora and immigration, won for her story “Brown Girls.” Our judge, Mia Alvar, who chose the story from more than 400 entries, praised it as a “pitch-perfect tale of growing up and making good, leaving home and looking back.” In five deceptively brief vignettes, Alvar added, “the author explores nuances of race and class, sex and marriage, family and community with great sensitivity and heart.” The story will be published in the Jan/Feb 2020 issue of the Kenyon Review, and Andreades will receive a scholarship to attend the KR Writers Workshop. Click here for the list of runners-up along with Mia Alvar’s comments on the winning works.

Why We Chose It

BY DAVID H. LYNN, EDITOR

“Blue Hills,” by Ali Hosseini, appears in the May/June 2019 issue of the Kenyon Review.

The opening of Ali Hosseini’s story “Blue Hills” is marvelously economical. Roy Montgomery, the story’s central character, “liked to introduce himself as RM—Rare Man, he would boast to his friends when he was younger. He always considered himself lucky, not because of the way girls used to flock around him at parties, but for drawing number 365 in the Vietnam draft lottery and not having to run away to Canada or, worse, coming back home in a body bag.” In these few lines we learn how RM likes to style himself to others—his understanding of his own identity. Read the rest of “Why We Chose It.”

Alarm and Awe: May/June Issue Features “Nature’s Nature”

Raspberries and white rhinos, jewel beetles and bladderwort inhabit the May/June issue of the Kenyon Review, much of which is devoted to “Nature’s Nature,” our annual feature on ecology and poetry. This year we offer twenty-seven new poems, an essay, and two portfolios of artwork—voices that “speak and sing with a combination of alarm and awe,” as KR Poetry Editor David Baker (and editor of the feature) writes in his introduction. In this fifth edition of “Nature’s Nature,” the backdrop remains, more urgently than ever before, the assault on the natural world. Shimmering with beauty, the poems “confess, historicize, accuse, remember, and mourn.” Subscribe or order a print or digital copy today!

Eye on Nature: Young Science Writers

Speaking of the natural world, we’d like to remind high school students (and their parents) that for the second summer, KR is offering a two-week writing workshop for students, ages 16 to 18, who find fascination and wonder in science as well as writing. Young Science Writers, which will run from June 23 to July 6, takes students out into the diverse habitats of Kenyon’s nature preserve, and into the college’s laboratories, to explore and experiment—and to incorporate their experiences into their writing. Reading and writing assignments in this extraordinary program draw from genres including research articles, journalism, essays, stories, and poetry. For more information, click here or contact Anna Duke Reach, director of programs, at reacha@kenyon.edu, or 740-427-5207.

Open Your Ears with Kenyon Review Out Loud

Keep in mind that you can experience every issue of KR not only by reading but also by listening, via “Kenyon Review Out Loud.” Since its debut last September, this feature has brought the journal’s outstanding prose and poetry to listeners as they walk, drive, make dinner, do the dishes, or simply sit, happily immersed. In most cases, the authors read their own work, giving you an opportunity to discover their voices literally, as it were. With the publication of the May/June issue, we have a new lineup of readings. Click here for the latest out-loud readings.

Proof Casts a Shadow: Work by Tsering Yangzom Lama, Misha Rai, and Xandria Phillips

At age twenty-six, I saw my country for the first time. For fifteen minutes, I stood on its edge. So begins the essay “A Wire Fence,” in which Tsering Yangzom Lama recounts each of those fifteen minutes—and delves further—as she describes how she, a Tibetan writer born in Nepal, visited the forbidden border zone to contemplate the country her grandparents had left fifty years earlier. Lama’s essay was recently published as part of “Proof Casts a Shadow,” the KROnline project created by KR fellows Keith S. Wilson and Misha Rai as a space for writers to grapple with issues of injustice. The other newest pieces in the project are “We Don’t Need Your Little History,” an essay in which Rai recalls a personal experience from her teen years to discuss the brutalization of girls and women in India, and “minotaurian,” a painting by the poet and visual artist Xandria Phillips. To read these latest pieces in “Proof Casts a Shadow,”as well as earlier ones, click here.

New in KR Podcasts

Poet Kimiko Hahn talks with her Peter Taylor Fellow Sylvia Beato-Davis about the significance of translation and conceiving words as portals and playgrounds. Listen to it!

From the KR Blog: “‘This Thing I Use to Stay Alive’: An Interview with Poet Husnaa Hashim”

BY K.E. OGDEN

April 11, 2019

For years I didn’t read much poetry; I mostly read nonfiction. That influenced my poetry in a positive way, but I needed to read more poetry, too. So you have to absorb nonfiction and alternate that absorption with other works like reading poets you admire, and reading poetry that you don’t understand. That’s important. It’s good to read contemporary people who are really cool to you—but it’s also good to read work that makes you say, “Wow, this is really crazy! I don’t understand what it means!” and let yourself push back from there. Read the entire interview with Hashim, the author of Honey Sequence and the 2017-18 Youth Poet Laureate of Philadelphia. An award-winning Slam poet (among other accomplishments), Hashim attended KR’s Young Writers Workshop, where K.E. Ogden was her instructor.

Poetry in Translation: Micro-Reviews

Our latest micro-reviews embrace twelve books originally in languages ranging from Spanish to Albanian, from Korean to Catalan, from Arabic to a “collision of French and English.” Many discoveries await you here. Among them:

• For the first time in English, the Argentinean visionary Miguel Ángel Bustos, whose Vision of the Children of Evil has been translated by Lucina Schell;
• the Mayan creation epic called The Popul Vuh, translated by Michael Bazzett, whose own book The Interrogation reflects a sensibility also at work in the translation;
• Xeixa: Fourteen Catalan Poets, translated by Marlon L. Flick and Francisca Esteve, representing more than fifty years of poetry in a language very rarely translated into English; and
• The French experimentalist Anne Kawala’s Screwball, in which translator Kit Schluter had to wrestle with new words and meanings resulting from “collisions” of French and English via gasket-like commas, hyphens, and boldface.

To read the micro-reviews, click here.

MAY 2019
CONTENTS
Short Fiction Contest
Why We Chose It
May/June 2019 Issue
Young Science Writers
Kenyon Review Out Loud
Proof Casts a Shadow
KR Podcasts
From the Blog
Recent Micro-Reviews

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