May 2020

Janika Oza Wins Short Fiction Contest

Congratulations to Janika Oza, who has won KR’s thirteenth annual short fiction contest. A writer based in Toronto, Canada, who explores themes of migration, borders, and displacement, Oza won for her story “Fish Stories.” It was chosen by our judge, Misha Rai, the KR Fellow in Prose, from among roughly 400 submissions. “From the first surprising, food-laden, dream-like sequence,” wrote Rai, “‘Fish Stories’ builds on a family’s story of loss and migration and hauntings . . . in what structurally seems like a breath. . . . I was equally impressed to see how in such a short space, ‘Fish Stories’ traverses whole continents, evoking the freeing and tragic nature of storytelling itself.” Oza will receive a scholarship to attend the KR Writers Workshop in the future, and her story will be published in the Jan/Feb 2021 issue of KR. The two runners-up in the contest were Steffi Sin (“Dungeness”) and Stanley Delgado (“Cactus Eater”), with honorable mentions going to Jane Chong (“Brothers”) and B.K. Elroy (“Choosing a Bow”). Click here for more information about the winners.

In Case You Missed It!

Last week, we announced that Nicole Terez Dutton—a widely admired poet, editor, and teacher—has been chosen as the new editor of the Kenyon Review. Nicole has already been working with the KR staff, remotely, so that she can hit the ground running when she arrives in Gambier to officially assume the editorship on July 1. Read the full press release here.

Celebrate with Savings on a Subscription

To share our excitement in welcoming Nicole Terez Dutton as the new editor of the Kenyon Review, we’re offering extraordinary savings on a subscription. You can get a full year of KR—six issues of great contemporary writing—for $24.99. That’s 60 percent off the cover price, and our best discount ever. Click here to take advantage of this limited-time offer.

Why We Chose It

BY DAVID H. LYNN, EDITOR

“From Which Village Is Your Mother,” by Etkin K.C., appears in the May/June 2020 issue of the Kenyon Review.

At first glance this seems a fragment, an excerpt, something neither fully realized nor complete in itself. Yet I find myself caught up, unable to look away or move on. The language is so sumptuous. And the first sentence offers its echo of Virginia Woolf: “A room of my own”—so the narrator, one may imagine, is a writer, perhaps deliberately self-isolating? (Which in the time of coronavirus takes on new resonance.) But then the sentence continues, providing direction, energy, a precise venue: “—down Istiklal Avenue halfway to the Galata Tower, off to the left, around three bends.” Read the rest of “Why We Chose It.”

Notes of Alarm and a Measure of Song: Nature Poetry Graces the May/June Issue

I walked through the enterprise of weeds. / A crow for each of us stood mounted on a fence. Stuart Dischell’s “Lines Along a Wild Place” opens our special section on environmental poetry in the May/June Kenyon Review. This year’s edition of “Nature’s Nature” includes twenty-nine new works by eighteen poets, selected by Poetry Editor David Baker. “I am encouraged when one more poet adds her notes of alarm to the claxon of communal concern,” writes Baker in his introduction to the section, “when one more poet offers language to personalize the small and large losses he sees, or when a poet writes poems that memorialize our diminishing varieties, species, possibilities, as well as each single loss we count: when one more poet works to add a complicated sense of beauty and a measure of song in the midst of our collective peril.” Be sure to check out the latest KR, which also includes new fiction by five exciting writers. Subscribe or order a print or digital copy today!

Aural Allure: KR Out Loud

Too many Zoom meetings tiring your eyes? Give them a rest. Open your ears. Most of the poems and stories in the just-published May/June KR are available in audible form, read aloud by their authors. It’s an intimate experience (but still counts as social distancing). Have a listen.

Safety First: KR Cancels Summer Workshops

The Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting restrictions imposed by the State of Ohio have led Kenyon College to keep its campus closed through July 31. As a result, KR has had to cancel its residential writing workshops for the summer of 2020. It’s a wrenching decision, but we feel—and hope you agree—that it’s the right one, given health concerns. Please note:

If you were accepted to one of the sessions of the Writers Workshops for 2020, we are offering you the option of deferring your participation until 2021. We’ll be in touch with all of you early this fall.

Although we have canceled both sessions of Young Writers for this summer, we are planning a small online pilot program for Young Science Writers, to run in late June and early July.

Thank you for your understanding as we navigate this difficult time. We look forward to welcoming an avid (and healthy) community of writers on the Kenyon campus in June and July of 2021.

On Video: KR Readings, Poems for Prisoners

The pandemic has not stopped us from sharing great writing and quenching the thirst for art. KR’s Spring Reading Series shifted to Zoom—and if you missed those live virtual events, you can catch them on video, here. These readings feature Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Kyle Swenson, Molly McCully Brown, Susannah Nevison, and Oliver de la Paz. You can also buy the writers’ books at our online store, here.

Meanwhile, for Poem in Your Pocket Day, our KR Associates read poems on video for our newly launched IGTV channel, an Instagram service. And they shared these video readings with prisoners in Ohio through a nonprofit called Healing Broken Circles, which provides educational, cultural, and therapeutic services to inmates at the Marion Correctional Institution, near Columbus. The program director of Healing Broken Circles is Pablo Tanguay, a KR contributor and former blogger. He noted that the prison, which has a thriving poetry community, has been hard hit by Covid-19.

New in KR Podcasts

KR Editor David Lynn sits down with T.C. Boyle, recipient of the 2019 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, to talk about inhabiting questions through fictional characters, testing the limits of form, and creating art for art’s sake. Listen to it!

From the KR Blog: “A Beijinger’s Quarantine Diary: Day 0-10”

BY XIAOCAO SALLY LIU

April 6, 2020

“I looked up to the TV: the grand, festive [New Year’s] Gala. I looked down on my phone: countless heartbreaking stories from Wuhan with giant question marks. I was living in two extremely different worlds simultaneously.” In A Beijinger’s Quarantine Diary, screenwriter Xiaocao Sally Liu (a former KR Young Writer) offers a personal account—by turns humorous and emotionally wrenching—of the unfolding of the coronavirus crisis. Meanwhile, Scenes from Quarantine brings together musings from many of our regular bloggers.

MAY 2020
CONTENTS

Fiction Contest Winner
New Editor
Subscription Offer
Why We Chose It
May/June 2020 Issue
Kenyon Review Out Loud
Writers Workshops
Spring Reading Series
KR Podcasts
From the Blog

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