Short Fiction Prize Introduction

How do the editors select exceptional fiction? Once a year, before we open the Short Fiction Contest, we meet with our Kenyon Review associates. You can’t teach what makes a great story in one day. But you can encourage students to become more attuned to the fiction they read.

On a Saturday morning each September—the first day of training for new associates—we file into the office with enthusiastic students holding flimsy cups of coffee. We leave the doors to the Cheever Room open. We explain that the Review has a long history of discovering new writers: it’s one of the great pleasures of the job. Early in their careers, W. S. Merwin and Flannery O’Connor were selected by John Crowe Ransom as Kenyon Review Fellows, a program we revived five years ago for a generation of new writers. KR was one of the first magazines to publish stories by writers like Thomas Pynchon (“Entropy,” 1960) and Louise Erdrich (“Lulu’s Boys,” 1984). In the last year, work that appeared in our pages by Ruth Galm, Chris Feliciano Arnold, Roohi Choudry, and Judy Troy was selected for the Best American Short Stories.