October 2018

Featuring Rita Dove, “Knox Reads!” Ushers in Literary Festival

Autumn in Ohio: the leaves float from the trees—and books dependably fall into readers’ laps, ready to be savored and discussed. Yes, the Knox Reads! community reading project has returned, with book giveaways and other events this year devoted to acclaimed poet Rita Dove. Free copies of Dove’s Collected Poems 1974-2004 were distributed in Mount Vernon and Gambier in September and early October. Starting on October 16 at the public library in Mount Vernon, a series of discussions will engage readers in Dove’s poetry. Dove, winner of the 2018 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, will come to the Kenyon campus as part of the week-long Kenyon Review Literary Festival. The festival opens on November 5, and Dove will deliver the Denham Sutcliffe Memorial Lecture on Friday, November 9. Check the web for more information about both Knox Reads! and the Kenyon Review Literary Festival.

Send It Soon! KR Reading Period Closes November 1

If you plan to submit to the Kenyon Review this year, you have a little less than a month left to send us your work. We will accept submissions—of short fiction, poetry, essays, drama, and translations—through 11:59 p.m. Eastern time, November 1, 2018. The process is online, and all submissions are considered, in a single pool, for both the print journal and KROnline. Click here to see our submission guidelines.

For High School Writers: Poetry Contest Opens Soon

The sixteenth annual Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers—open to high school sophomores and juniors throughout the world—will begin accepting entries in November. The winner receives a full scholarship to the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop, and the winning poem will be published in the Review, along with the poems of the two runners-up. Submissions are accepted electronically through November 30. Learn more about the contest.

“Better Oxygen”: Check Out the 2019 Writers Workshops

Apparently there’s a scientific reason for the creative surge that writers experience at KR’s summer workshops. “I think the oxygen is a little bit better” on the Kenyon campus, said novelist A.J. Verdelle playfully when she was in Gambier last June to teach one of our fiction workshops. But there’s also our process: whatever your genre, you produce fresh work every day, and share your work every day, along with fellow writers and superb instructors. Participants tell us that this “generative” approach does far more for their writing, including their works-in-progress, than workshops where they bring in existing material. We’ve already scheduled our 2019 workshops, so save these dates and check the KR website for more information:

June 16-22, 2019
Fiction, Literary Nonfiction, Poetry, Spiritual Writing
July 7-13, 2019
Fiction, Literary Nonfiction, Poetry, Translation, Writers Workshop for Teachers
Read more about the workshops here.

Notes from Finn House

Two KR editors will be widening their roles this year, bringing new ideas and fresh perspectives to KROnline—our web-based magazine—and to the poetry we publish. Associate Editor and Kenyon Professor of English Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky, who works on virtually every facet of the Kenyon Review, will take the lead in exploring innovations for KROnline. “We’re interested in expanding the range of genres and forms that we publish on KRO to include graphic, multimedia, and mixed media forms,” said Lobanov-Rostovsky. “What that likely means in practice is more visual art, video, and sound exploring literary themes or expanding the range of what we consider to be ‘literary’ beyond the printed word.”

Meanwhile, Andrew Grace will serve as acting poetry editor while long-time editor David Baker takes a year-long sabbatical. The author of three poetry collections and the winner of an Academy of American Poets prize, Grace teaches English at Kenyon and has been an editor at large with KR. “Reading poems in the Kenyon Review was a big part of what made me want to become a poet in the first place,” said Grace, “so to have an increased role this year in selecting the poetry that appears in the print magazine and KROnline is a real thrill. I’m also really looking forward to seeing what our guest poetry editors have in store for our readers.” (See the September newsletter for a list of upcoming guest editors.)

New in KR Podcasts

Adam Cayton-Holland talks with KR’s own Katharine Weber about his new memoir, Tragedy + Time, his career as a comedian, his sister’s suicide, and the many influences, from comic books to television, that have shaped his sensibility along the path to success. Coming up later this month: a podcast marking LGBTQ+ history month, with Timothy Bussey of Kenyon’s diversity office interviewing poets Richie Hofmann, Juniper Cruz, and Claire Oleson.
Listen to it!

From the KR Blog: “The Structure of Nanette”

BY LAURA MAYLENE WALTER

September 13, 2018

Much has been written in recent months of Nanette, comedian Hannah Gadsby’s groundbreaking Netflix standup special. . . . When I first watched Nanette several months ago, I went into it knowing three things: it was somehow a comedy show about Gadsby contemplating quitting comedy, scores of viewers found it profoundly moving, and, if I was anything like my friends who watched it before me, it would probably make me cry. Nanette delivered on all three fronts. But even as I sat in a kind of heartbroken trance in the final act of the show, I couldn’t entirely shut off my writer’s brain, which reveled in the sophisticated structure of Gadsby’s performance. . . . I was experiencing a layered, complex work. Read the entire blog post.

Start Every Weekend with KR

New poetry, fiction, essays. New author interviews. Writers reading their work aloud. You can make some of our most popular features a part of your regular routine with KR Weekend, a brightly designed email that will sweeten your inbox every Friday with a taste of contemporary literature. This weekly offering, which grew out of our Weekend Reads email, includes not only a sampling of pieces from KROnline but also links to Kenyon Review Out Loud readings as well as to our “micro-conversations,” in which KR authors reflect on inspiration and craft. Because readers enjoyed seeing the KROnline links and the micro-conversations here in the monthly newsletter, we decided to move them to KR Weekend, where they’d be available more often. To make sure you are signed up to receive KR Weekend, please click here.

Latest Micro-reviews Highlight Poetry in Translation

September was National Translation Month, and KR Translations Editor Katherine Hedeen marked the occasion by assembling a fresh array of micro-reviews examining volumes of poetry in translation. The original works are in French, German, Serbian, and Spanish. The translators (and translating teams): Julie Carr and Jennifer Pap, Heather Green, David Keplinger, Seth Michelson, Steven and Maja Teref, and Jose Antonia Villarán. Read the latest micro-reviews.

OCTOBER 2018
CONTENTS
2018 Literary Festival
Accepting Submissions
Grodd Poetry Contest
Writers Workshops
New Editoral Roles
KR Podcast
From the Blog
KR Weekend
Micro-Reviews

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