The magazine's short stories have won more O. Henry Awards than any other nonprofit journal—42 in all.[4][5][6] Many poems that first appeared in the quarterly have been reprinted in The Best American Poetry series, and the magazine is one of the most frequent sources for the series, where poems originally in The Kenyon Review have appeared in the editions for 1992, 1993, 1994, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2006.
The magazine was started in 1939.[7] During his 21-year tenure as editor, John Crowe Ransom made the magazine "perhaps the best known and most influential literary magazine in the English-speaking world during the 1940s and '50s".[3]
A decade after Ransom left the magazine, in 1969, Kenyon College closed it down as the magazine's reputation dropped and financial burdens continued.
In 1979, the quarterly was started up again under Kenyon College President Phillip Hardin Jordan Jr. with Kenyon Professors of English Fred Turner, Ron Sharp, and William Klein as its editors. In 1989, The Kenyon Review had a circulation of 4,500.[13]Marilyn Hacker, a poet, became the magazine's first full-time editor in 1990. "She quickly broadened the quarterly's scope to include more minority and marginalized viewpoints," according to the magazine.[3]
In April 1994, the college trustees directed that costs be cut and revenues increased in various ways. Hacker left and an English professor at the college, David H. Lynn (acting editor in 1989–1990), took over on a two-thirds time basis, becoming the longest-serving editor of the publication. The publication's finances have stabilized and improved, and a Kenyon Review Board of Trustees has been set up.[3]
The Kenyon Review Short Fiction Prize, established in 2008, is awarded annually to a writer who has not previously published a work of fiction.[14]Cara Blue Adams won the inaugural contest, judged by novelist Alice Hoffman, while Nick Ripatrazone and Megan Mayhew Bergman were named runners-up.[15]
Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement
The "Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement"[16] was created in 2002 to honor careers of extraordinary literary achievement, recognizing writers whose influence and importance have shaped the American literary landscape. It celebrates writers for the courage of their vision, their unparalleled imagination, and for the beauty of their art. The award is presented at a gala benefit dinner each year in New York City.
The first award was presented to novelist E .L. Doctorow (Kenyon College '52). Novelist and short-story writer Joyce Carol Oates received the award in 2003, while poet Seamus Heaney won it in 2004. The 2005 honorees were Umberto Eco, the novelist, and Roger Angell, the New Yorker fiction editor and baseball writer. In 2006 Ian McEwan received the award; Margaret Atwood followed in 2007, and Pulitzer Prize winning Independence Day author Richard Ford in 2008. In 2009 Louise Erdrich was honored, and in 2010 poet W.S. Merwin received the award. Historian, essayist and critic Simon Schama was the winner in 2011. Author and human rights advocate Elie Wiesel received the honor in 2012. In 2013 the poet Carl Phillips received the award, followed by novelist Ann Patchett in 2014. Roger Rosenblatt, author and playwright, won in 2015. The Kenyon Review honored author Hilary Mantel in 2016, and in 2017 acknowledged author Colm Toibin. In 2018, the award recognized American poet and essayist Rita Dove, a National Humanities and National Medal of Arts recipient, Pulitzer Prize winner and past U.S. poet laureate. In 2019, novelist, short story writer and USC Distinguished Professor of English T. C. Boyle received the award. While no award event took place in 2020, in 2021 the Board of Trustees honored its long serving editor, now editor emeritus, David Lynn as the nineteenth recipient of the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement. Walter Mosley was given the award in 2023.
Proceeds from the annual dinner go to the Kenyon Review's endowment fund, which supports both the magazine and the scholarships and fellowships to the Review's summer writing programs. In 2017, members of the Board of Trustees of Kenyon College, Kenyon Review and Gund Gallery established the E. L. Doctorow Fund to provide additional scholarship support to a student committed to arts and literature.
Poetry submissions
Poetry editor David Baker, in a 2019 interview, provided information on submissions and the process. The magazine receives over 3,000 submissions a year (batches, not individual poems), and publishes some 50 of them per year in the print version, another 25 in the annual "Nature's Nature" feature on ecopoetics (published May-June). Of those 75, perhaps 15 or 20 are solicited, and so around 60 come via the open submission route. More poems are published in the Kenyon Review Online. A group of trained student associates do part of the first reading and they have the right to reject; it takes two such rejections before a poem is actually rejected. Baker does the final selection, and David Lynn does the "final sign-off".[17]
Edgar Lawrence Doctorow was an American novelist, editor, and professor, best known for his works of historical fiction.
John Crowe Ransom was an American educator, scholar, literary critic, poet, essayist and editor. He is considered to be a founder of the New Criticism school of literary criticism. As a faculty member at Kenyon College, he was the first editor of the widely regarded Kenyon Review. Highly respected as a teacher and mentor to a generation of accomplished students, he also was a prize-winning poet and essayist. He was nominated for the 1973 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was an American poet. He was born into a Boston Brahmin family that could trace its origins back to the Mayflower. His family, past and present, were important subjects in his poetry. Growing up in Boston also informed his poems, which were frequently set in Boston and the New England region. The literary scholar Paula Hayes believes that Lowell mythologized New England, particularly in his early work.
Rita Frances Dove is an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 from the previous "consultant in poetry" position (1937–86). Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. Since 1989, she has been teaching at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she held the chair of Commonwealth Professor of English from 1993 to 2020; as of 2020, she holds the chair of Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing.
Randall Jarrelljə-REL was an American poet, literary critic, children's author, essayist, and novelist. He was the 11th Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress—a position that now bears the title Poet Laureate of the United States.
John Kinsella is an Australian poet, novelist, critic, essayist and editor. His writing is strongly influenced by landscape, and he espouses an "international regionalism" in his approach to place. He has also frequently worked in collaboration with other writers, artists and musicians.
Matthew Hillsman Taylor Jr., known professionally as Peter Taylor, was an American novelist, short story writer, and playwright. Born and raised in Tennessee and St. Louis, Missouri, he wrote frequently about the urban South in his stories and novels.
A literary magazine is a periodical devoted to literature in a broad sense. Literary magazines usually publish short stories, poetry, and essays, along with literary criticism, book reviews, biographical profiles of authors, interviews and letters. Literary magazines are often called literary journals, or little magazines, terms intended to contrast them with larger, commercial magazines.
In the United States, a little magazine is a magazine genre consisting of "artistic work which for reasons of commercial expediency is not acceptable to the money-minded periodicals or presses", according to a 1942 study by Frederick J. Hoffman, a professor of English. While George Plimpton disagreed with the diminutive connotations of "little", the name "little magazine" is widely accepted for such magazines. A little magazine is not necessarily a literary magazine, because while the majority of such magazines are literary in nature, containing poetry and fiction, a significant proportion of such magazines are not. Some have encompassed the full range of the arts, and others have grown from zine roots.
Anthony Evan Hecht was an American poet. His work combined a deep interest in form with a passionate desire to confront the horrors of 20th century history, with the Second World War, in which he fought, and the Holocaust being recurrent themes in his work.
The Sewanee Review is an American literary magazine established in 1892. It is the oldest continuously published quarterly in the United States. It publishes original fiction and poetry, essays, reviews, and literary criticism.
Josephine Jacobsen was a Canadian-born American poet, short story writer, essayist, and critic. She was appointed the twenty-first Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1971. In 1997, she received the Poetry Society of America's highest award, the Robert Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry.
Rodney T. Smith is an American poet, fiction writer, and editor. The author of twelve poetry collections and a collection of short fiction, Smith is the editor of Shenandoah, a prestigious literary journal published by Washington and Lee University. His poetry and stories are identified with Southern literature and have been published in magazines and literary journals such as The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Southern Humanities Review, and The Kenyon Review.
The Massachusetts Review is a literary quarterly founded in 1959 by a group of professors from Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. It receives financial support from Five Colleges, Inc., a consortium which includes Amherst College and four other educational institutions in a short geographical radius.
Robie Mayhew Macauley was an American editor, novelist and critic whose literary career spanned more than 50 years.
Beth Ann Fennelly is an American poet and prose writer and was the Poet Laureate of Mississippi.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
George William Lanning Jr. was an American editor, novelist and critic whose literary career spanned the 1950s through the 1980s.
John Anderson Thompson, Jr. was an American professor, poet, literary critic and writer whose literary career spanned sixty years, from 1938 to 1998.
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