November 2019

This Week: The Kenyon Review Literary Festival

If you’re anywhere near the Kenyon College campus, don’t miss the Kenyon Review Literary Festival, going on this week, November 4-8. Highlights:

• Tuesday, November 5, a reading by Lebanese-American poet Ruth Awad, author of Set to Music a Wildfire.
• Wednesday, November 6, “Cultural Malaise: Writers on Social Responsibility and the Rhetoric of Change,” a reading and discussion on social engagement with Awad as well as Kenyon creative-writing faculty members Keija Parssinen, Orchid Tierney, and Ira Sukrungruang.
• Thursday, November 7, a reading by the winner of the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Creative Nonfiction Award: Dawn Davies, author of Mothers of Sparta: A Memoir in Pieces.
• Friday, November 8, “An Evening with T.C. Boyle.” Winner of the 2019 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, Boyle—the prolific fiction writer—will deliver the Denham Sutcliffe Memorial Lecture.

For more information on the Literary Festival and a complete schedule, click here.

Why We Chose It

BY MISHA RAI, KENYON REVIEW FELLOW

“Antropófaga” by Ananda Lima, appears in the Sept/Oct 2019 issue of Kenyon Review Online.

“She devoured tiny Americans that came out of the vending machine.” So begins “Antropófaga,” Ananda Lima’s chilling and compelling strange story. Like the title of the story, which means man-eating or cannibalistic, the opening scenes not only root the story’s central character, Béia, in her struggles, one of which is to stop cannibalizing a snack of animated Americans, but also have her recall her first time eating that particular disturbing snack: “it’d been a pinkish overweight man, flowery shirt, white sneakers, and socks biting at his thick ankles.” Read the rest of Why We Chose It.

Active Voice: The Bold Talent of Molly McCully Brown

The first thing that strikes you about Molly McCully Brown is her eloquent energy. The words come fast, sculpting ideas—earnest, playful, complex, speculative, thoughts wholly formed or tweaked in mid-air—as if propelled by a kind of verbal joy. “There’s no passive anything in Molly,” says a friend. “There’s an urgency in her voice as a writer. And as a person—any room she’s in, she doesn’t just sit back. She shows up.” Brown, who arrived in Gambier this August for a two-year stint as the Kenyon Review Fellow in Poetry, has been showing up a lot in the literary world of late. Her first poetry collection, The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, has won wide acclaim. This coming spring, two more books will appear: a poetic collaboration and a collection of essays. Read our profile of Brown, who first discovered Kenyon at the Young Writers summer program after winning the Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize.

High School Writers: Send Us Your Poems, Now!

If you’ve read the profile of acclaimed poet Molly McCully Brown (above), you know that she’s a former winner of our annual Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers—and that she’s judging the contest in this, its seventeenth year. Open to high school sophomores and juniors from throughout the world, the contest is accepting entries, online, now through November 30. The winner receives a full scholarship to the Kenyon Review Young Writers or Young Science Writers Workshop, and the winning poem will be published in the Review, along with the poems of the two runners-up. Brown, who is currently the KR Fellow in Poetry, won the Grodd Prize in 2008 and is eager to read this year’s submissions. “As a judge of this contest,” she said, “you get to discover so many new voices; you’re seeing what poetry may look like in ten or twenty years—you get a sneak peek.” Click here for information about the contest and how to enter.

Summer Writers Workshops: Apply Now!

The online application site is now open for our Summer 2020 Writers Workshops. And we encourage you to apply early, as we have a rolling admissions policy. Places fill up fast. You can learn more about the workshops and instructors on our website, but here’s a quick rundown of our 2020 schedule, with sessions and instructors:

June 21-27, 2020
Fiction: Angie Cruz, Caitlin Horrocks
Literary Nonfiction: Rebecca McClanahan, Dinty W. Moore
Poetry: Kimiko Hahn, Carl Phillips, Shara McCallum, Solmaz Sharif
Spiritual Writing: Kaveh Akbar, Jamie Quatro

July 12-18, 2020
Fiction: E.J Levy, Ira Sukrungruang, Nick White, Nancy Zafris
Literary Nonfiction: Geeta Kothari
Poetry: David Baker, Dan Beachy-Quick, Natalie Shapero
Translation: Katherine M. Hedeen and Elizabeth Lowe
Writers Workshop for Teachers: Erick Gordon, Brad Richard
Read more about the workshops here.

Nov/Dec Features Voices of Literary Activism

“The fierce contributors to this issue have elected to sing,” writes Rita Dove, “some in march tempo, others as lullaby.” Dove, the distinguished poet, and John Kinsella—also a noted poet, as well as KR’s international editor—are the guest editors of the just-published Nov/Dec Kenyon Review, a special issue devoted to literary activism. The issue includes two pieces by Diane Glancy, an essay about the Dakota Access Pipeline and a poem picturing Syrian President Bashar al Assad; a wide-ranging memoir/essay by Aminatta Forna; three poems each by Kwame Dawes and Carolyn Forché; and two poems by Sandra Cisneros. Dove and Kinsella have chosen twenty-two writers in all who, as Kinsella notes, speak out against oppression and offer “sparking” examples of creative resistance. “These are works of documentation and witness, of personal experience and the search for empathy.” Subscribe or order a print or digital copy today!

KR Out Loud

With every new issue of the magazine, we lift the voices of our writers off the page and bring them to your ears, via KR Out Loud—with most of the pieces being read by the authors themselves. The latest installment features pieces from the Nov/Dec special issue on literary activism. Click here for the new out-loud readings.

New in KR Podcasts

We’ll call your attention to two recent podcasts. First, Kenyon students Claire Oleson and Brent Matheny talk with poet Tommy Pico about the similarities between poetry and screenwriting, what to do with writing advice, and his choice of his nickname/persona “Teebs.” Listen to it!
Second, in recognition of National LGBTQ+ History Month, Timothy Bussey, assistant director of Kenyon’s Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, interviews lecturer Bilal Tajildeen about Stoker’s Dracula, Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, and queer literature from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Listen to it!

From the KR Blog: “‘A Record of What It Meant’: An Interview with Carl Phillips”

BY RUTH JOFFRE

October 2, 2019

I can’t say that there’s any craft book that’s been influential [for me], since I really came to poetry by reading poetry—it’s still the best way, I believe, to learn how to write poetry, by studying poems that work and trying to figure out how they work. Later, I discovered books like Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town, but is that a craft book or more a book of inspiration about the process of writing? I don’t know. Probably most influential was a prosody book, Hollander’s Rhyme’s Reason, from which I taught myself a lot of prosodic forms one winter by writing two of each one mentioned in that book. Read the entire interview, one in a series of conversations exploring the topic of craft. Phillips, who has written fourteen books of poetry, is also the author of two books of essays on the art and craft of poetry—The Art of Daring and Coin of the Realm.

A More Pleasing Screen

Maybe you noticed, maybe you didn’t. We’ve (how best to say it?) refreshed, updated, sharpened, spiffed up, and generally improved the KR website. The goal was to make it cleaner, bolder, and easier to navigate—all in all, more useful and more pleasing. You’ll see that the homepage is similar, but with better-organized pull-down menus and (we think) a more striking design. Similar changes (organizational, aesthetic) improve the pages for our workshops. An “Audio/Video” menu will take you to our ever-popular podcasts and (with greater ease than before) our increasingly popular videos of readings, panel discussions, and lectures. From the print journal and KROnline to contest guidelines and special events, everything we all love about KR is still on the web. It’s all just, well, nicer. Check out the new website!

Out There: KR Associates in the World

In a new feature created by our interns, we catch up with KR Associates who have graduated and are contributing their talents to the world. To kick things off, Olivia Kane, Class of 2022, profiles Taylor Hazan, who graduated this past spring. A double major in English and anthropology, Hazan became a Newman’s Own Foundation fellow and works with RefugePoint, an organization dedicated to identifying global refugees who may fall through the cracks of typical humanitarian aid. Read her profile here.

NOVEMBER 2019
CONTENTS

Literary Festival
Why We Chose It
Profile of Molly Brown
Grodd Contest
Summer Workshops
Nov/Dec Issue
KR Out Loud
KR Podcasts
From the Blog
Website Refresh
Associate Spotlight

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