September 2018

Rita Dove to Receive KR Achievement Award

I was pirouette and flourish, / I was filigree and flame. The lines, from Rita Dove’s poem “Testimonial,” might be a small anthem for her magnificent talent—and for a forty-year career that includes more than a dozen books, the 1987 Pulitzer Prize, a term as the poet laureate of the United States in 1993-95, and numerous other honors. In recognition of her artistry, the Kenyon Review has chosen Dove as the 2018 recipient of the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement. She will receive the award at a gala dinner in New York City on Wednesday, November 7. Then she travels to Gambier, Ohio, to participate in the annual Kenyon Review Literary Festival. The week-long festival culminates on Friday, November 9 with Dove’s delivering the Denham Sutcliffe Memorial Lecture, followed by a book signing. Starting in late September, moreover, as part of “Knox Reads,” KR will give away free copies of Dove’s Collected Poems: 1974-2004, and will sponsor a series of discussions. Our next newsletter will bring you more news about the literary festival. Meanwhile, click here to learn more about Dove and the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement.

Revise and Submit! KR Reading Period Opens September 15

Little known fact: Kenyon Review editors adjust their socks so that they can be knocked off by great writing. Now is the time to knock our socks off with new poetry, short fiction, essays, drama, and translations. KR will accept submissions—an online process—from September 15 through November 1, 2018. We choose for both the print magazine and KROnline from a single pool of submissions. Our promise: We read everything, and our relatively short reading period allows us to give equal consideration to all submissions. Click here to see our submission guidelines.

Why We Chose It

BY MAGGIE SMITH, CONSULTING EDITOR

“Origin Story,” by Karin Gottshall, appears in the Sept/Oct 2018 issue of the Kenyon Review.

Biologically, our origin stories are not that varied—sperm, egg, and so on. But what child hasn’t at some point asked their parents: Where did I come from? Where was I before I was here? Why am I the way I am? Knowing the science that brought us to the world doesn’t shut down our curiosity or the sense that some magic was involved. Read the rest of “Why We Chose It.”

Treasure Hunter

Ask KR’s new fiction editor, Kirsten Reach, for the secret of her success in bringing new writers to the Kenyon Review, and she’ll say with a laugh, “I write fan letters.” It’s a modest way of alluding to her enthusiastic immersion in reading, reading, reading—then reaching out to writers who capture her imagination. A master networker with a strong background in publishing and a savvy touch in the digital realm, Reach plays a central role in KR’s efforts to increase diversity in its pages and on its screens. Read the entire story.

New Editors Join KR This Reading Period

As the 2018 reading period opens, a number of new editors will help solicit and assess submissions, as part of KR’s effort to continually widen perspectives, publish fresh voices, and increase diversity. We welcome the following editorial minds:

• Reginald Dwayne Betts, as a guest editor for poetry for the Sept/Oct 2020 issue. Betts was a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow in 2012.
• Jaquira Díaz, as consulting editor in prose. A former KR Fellow and a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Díaz will guest-edit fiction and nonfiction for the Mar/Apr 2020 issue.
• Rita Dove and John Kinsella, as guest-editors for an issue on literary activism, to be published in Nov/Dec 2019. Dove is a widely acclaimed poet who will receive the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement this year. Kinsella, the international editor for KR, is a noted writer, publisher, and editor.
• Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, as critic-at-large. Jeffers is professor of English at University of Oklahoma.
• Nate Marshall, as consulting editor in poetry. A Cave Canem fellow, Marshall received the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation in 2015.
• Diana Babineau Owen, as consulting editor in prose. Owen is the managing editor of In These Times magazine and the former managing editor of Orion.
• Natalie Shapero, currently an editor-at-large for KR, as a guest editor for poetry for the Sept/Oct 2019 issue. Shapero teaches at Tufts University as professor of the practice of poetry.
• Solmaz Sharif, as a guest editor for poetry for the Jan/Feb 2020 issue. Sharif was a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow in 2014 and won a Lannan Foundation Poetry Fellowship in 2016.

In Print Now: the Sept/Oct 2018 Issue

“She sighed, and he understood. The American in Ağri buying a pregnancy test. The rumors that would spread.” Joshua Idaszak’s “May It Come Easy,” set in eastern Turkey and involving a young American teacher, his Muslim lover, and her unsuspecting uncle, draws us, rapt, through a daylong bureaucratic odyssey in which emotional and cultural tensions thicken around an anxious quest for an exit stamp. Idaszak’s story is just one of the gems to be found in the Sept/Oct issue of the Kenyon Review. You’ll also find stories by Jonathan Blum, Dariel Suarez, and Haïm Hazaz; a memoir by Lesley Jenike dealing with singing, voice, motherhood, family, and connection; and poetry by Mary Ruefle, Yuki Tanaka, Kazim Ali, Chet’la Sebree, Brian Brodeur, and Roger Desy, among others. Subscribe or order a print or digital copy today!

Enjoy a Reading at Kenyon This Fall

From long-admired writers like Katharine Weber and T.R. Hummer to new stars like R.O. Kwon—whose recently published debut novel, The Incendiaries, is attracting widespread attention—an array of gifted authors will share their work on the Kenyon College campus this fall as part of the Kenyon Review Reading Series. The series opens on September 11 with a joint reading by KR fellows Misha Rai and Keith Wilson. Several readings are cosponsored by the College’s English Department. Click here for a complete schedule of the fall readings.

The Enchanted Listener: Introducing “Kenyon Review Out Loud”

Stories, poems, and essays can captivate us with a special kind of intimacy when we hear them aloud, read by their authors or by talented readers. Recognizing the power of the spoken word, KR is introducing a new feature, “Kenyon Review Out Loud.” As each issue of the magazine appears, we’ll bring you readings from that issue, supplementing the aesthetic experience of the printed page with the option of encountering the work via the human voice. Our initial offerings include seven poems, two stories, and an essay from the Sept/Oct issue. Click here to learn more about this new feature and to hear our first “Out Loud” selections.

New in KR Podcasts

Yohanca Delgado, a Peter Taylor Fellow during the 2018 Writers Workshops, talks to novelist and workshop instructor A.J. Verdelle about facts, musical prose, and the ways in which the revision process is like getting dressed. Listen to it!

From KROnline: “The Old Woman in the Bus Next Door”

BY AMY MARSH

I was weeding my garden one afternoon in May when two officers drove down my driveway to say a search was underway for my neighbor Charlotte. Eighty-six and nearly blind, Charlotte no longer drove, and every so often I saw a cab pick her up. That morning, a cab driver had reported her missing. That’s too bad came the callous blip of a thought. She’s probably dead. Read the essay.

From the KR Blog: “On ‘Ethnic Fiction’”

BY AATIF RASHID

August 13, 2018

[Many literary agents] told me I needed bring out the “Muslim” and “Pakistani” elements of my characters. One of them even put it as bluntly as they could, saying that the main reason a reader would pick up a work by a non-white writer is to be introduced to an unfamiliar culture. My novel, alas, was ultimately too American, and my brown characters too “white.” Needless to say, none of these agents were people of color. . . . [T]heir approach assumed that I’d be writing exclusively for a white audience. And this, in microcosm, is my problem with the label “ethnic fiction.” Beyond just the term, the very idea of the category assumes a white audience, as if there’s something so different about marginalized perspectives that novels that feature them must be placed in their own separate category. White writers get to be minimalist or postmodern . . . but writers of color are inevitably always writers of “ethnic fiction.” Read the entire blog post.

A Micro-Conversation with Victoria Chang

“Chang’s “Obit” poems appear in the July/Aug 2018 issue of the Kenyon Review.

What was your original impetus for writing the “Obit” series?

My mom died in 2015 after a long illness (pulmonary fibrosis) and while I didn’t want to write about it or write elegies (form seemed clichéd to me), I ended up writing these OBITs because I heard on NPR that someone had made a documentary on obituary writers and obituaries and the documentary was called OBIT. I loved that word and I went home and after two weeks had written seventy-five of these. I’ve been working on them for over two years and have a new manuscript now. When my mom died, I felt/feel that everything died. And so that’s how each singular OBIT came about. Read the rest of the conversation.

SEPTEMBER 2018
CONTENTS
Dove Wins Award
Submissions Open
Why We Chose It
New Fiction Editor
New Editors
Sept/Oct 2018 Issue
Gambier Reading Series
Out Loud
KR Podcast
From KROnline
From the Blog
KR Conversations

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