We will be accepting poetry manuscripts between November 1 and November 30, 2024. 

The Kenyon Review publishes the winning poetry in print, and the author is awarded a full scholarship to attend the Kenyon Review Writers Workshops.

(Note: If you are a high school student in your sophomore or junior year, please submit to the Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers.)

• Submit via our Submittable portal. We cannot accept paper submissions. 
• Writers must not have published a book of poetry at the time of submission. (We define a “published book of poetry” as a full-length poetry book, poetry chapbook, or other poetry collection written by you and published by someone other than you in print, on the web, or in ebook format.)
• Please submit 3-5 poems, no longer than ten pages.
• Please submit no more than once per year. 
• Please do not simultaneously submit your contest entry to another magazine or contest. 
• Please do not submit work that has been previously published.
• Before you submit, please remove your name and any other identifying information from your manuscript.
• The Submittable portal will remain active between November 1 and 30, 2024. 
• The entry fee for the Poetry Contest is just $24, collected at the time of submission. All entrants are invited to claim a complimentary half-year Print plus Digital subscription to The Kenyon Review (for domestic addresses) or a half-year Digital-only subscription (for international addresses) through December 15, 2024. Your new half-year subscription to The Kenyon Review will include the Spring 2025 and Summer 2025 issues. Current subscribers will receive a two-issue extension on their current subscription. As always, we will open in the fall for regular submissions, which we read at no cost to writers.

The final judge of this year’s contest is Diane Seuss. Diane Seuss was born in Indiana and raised in Michigan. Seuss is the author of the poetry collections Modern Poetry (2024), Frank: Sonnets (2021), winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (2018); Four-Legged Girl (2015), finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open (2010), winner of the 2009 Juniper Prize for Poetry; and It Blows You Hollow (1998). Her work has appeared in Poetry, the Georgia Review, Brevity, Able Muse, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and the Missouri Review, as well as The Best American Poetry 2014. She was the MacLean Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of English at Colorado College in 2012, and she has taught at Kalamazoo College since 1988. Seuss earned a BA from Kalamazoo College and an MSW from Western Michigan University. 

Winners will be announced in the late spring. You will receive an email notifying you of any decisions regarding your work.

Thanks for your interest in The Kenyon Review!

Submissions for the Kenyon Review Short Nonfiction Contest are accepted electronically every year from November 15 through December 31, 2024.

The Kenyon Review publishes the winning essay in print, and the author is awarded a full scholarship to attend the Kenyon Review Writers Workshops.

• Submit via our Submittable portal. We cannot accept paper submissions. 
• Writers must not have published a book of creative nonfiction at the time of submission. (We define a “published book of creative nonfiction” as a memoir, book of essays, or other creative nonfiction collection written by you and published by someone other than you in print, on the web, or in ebook format.)
• Submissions must be no more than 3,000 words in length.
• Please submit no more than once per year. 
• Please do not simultaneously submit your contest entry to another magazine or contest. 
• Please do not submit work that has been previously published.
• Before you submit, please remove your name and any other identifying information from your manuscript.
• The Submittable portal will remain active between November 15 and December 31, 2024. 
• The entry fee for the Short Nonfiction Contest is just $24, collected at the time of submission. All entrants are invited to claim a complimentary half-year Print plus Digital subscription to The Kenyon Review (for domestic addresses) or a half-year Digital-only subscription (for international addresses) through January 15, 2025. Your new half-year subscription to The Kenyon Review will include the Spring 2025 and Summer 2025 issues. Current subscribers will receive a two-issue extension on their current subscription. As always, we will open in the fall for regular submissions, which we read at no cost to writers.

The final judge of this year's contest is Lucy Ives. Lucy Ives is the author of three novels: Impossible Views of the World, published by Penguin Press and selected as a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice; Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World, published by Soft Skull Press and also a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice; and Life Is Everywhere, published by Graywolf Press and a best book of 2022 with The New Yorker and the Seattle Times.

Her short fiction is collected in the recent Cosmogony (Soft Skull Press, 2021). In spring 2020, Siglio Press published The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader, the first definitive anthology of poet-architect Gins's poetry and prose, edited and with an introduction by Ives. Ives's writing has appeared in Art in America, Artforum, The Baffler, The Believer, The Chronicle of Higher Education, frieze, Granta, Harper's, Lapham's Quarterly,  n+1, and Vogue, among other publications. For five years she was an editor with the online magazine Triple Canopy.

A graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from New York University. She is currently Bonderman Assistant Professor of the Practice in Literary Arts at Brown University and was a recipient of a 2018 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

Her most recent book of essays, An Image of My Name Enters America, was published by Graywolf Press.

Winners will be announced in the late spring. You will receive an email notifying you of any decisions regarding your work.

Thanks for your interest in The Kenyon Review!

The Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers, created in 2007 to recognize outstanding young poets, is an annual contest for poets who are sophomores and juniors in high school. The contest is named in honor of Patricia Grodd in recognition of her generous support of The Kenyon Review and its programs, as well as her passionate commitment to education and deep love for poetry.

The poems by the winner and runners-up will be published in The Kenyon Review, and the winner receives a full scholarship to the Kenyon Review Young Writers workshop. Submissions for the contest are open every year November 1 through November 30. 

• To submit your poem: fill out the fields below, attach your file, and click the "submit here" button. 
• Please submit only one poem to the contest. Only unpublished work will be considered for the prize. Please do not simultaneously submit your contest entry to another magazine or contest. 
• You must be a high school sophomore or junior to enter.
• Make sure your file is one of the following formats: PDF, Word document (.doc or .docx), Rich Text Format (.rtf), Microsoft Wordpad and Notepad, Apple TextEdit (.txt).
• We charge no entry fee. It is free to enter. 
• Submit between November 1 and November 30, 2024.

The final judge of this year’s contest is acclaimed poet Cate Marvin. Cate Marvin’s first book, World’s Tallest Disaster, was chosen by Robert Pinsky for the 2000 Kathryn A. Morton Prize and published by Sarabande Books in 2001. In 2002, she received the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize. She co-edited with poet Michael Dumanis the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande Books, 2006). Her second book of poems, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, for which she received a Whiting Award, was published by Sarabande in 2007. Her third book of poems, Oracle, published by W.W. Norton & Co., was named by The New York Times as one of “The Best Poetry Books of 2015.” Marvin teaches poetry writing in the Stonecoast M.F.A. Program at the University of Southern Maine and is Professor of English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. A recent Guggenheim Fellow, she lives in Scarborough, Maine. Event Horizon, her fourth collection, appeared from Copper Canyon Press in 2022.

Winners will be announced in early February 2025 via email, on The Kenyon Review website, and in the February Kenyon Review newsletter. 

Thanks for your interest in The Kenyon Review.

The Kenyon Review Developmental Editing Fellowship for Emerging Writers is designed to nurture and develop new voices in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. The fellowship will provide support for emerging writers who demonstrate exceptional talent, promise, and commitment to their chosen craft. Participation in the program involves one-on-one mentorship by an experienced editor on the KR team over a period of four months. Fellows can expect to have monthly hour-long conversations with a Developmental Editor, who will provide feedback and suggestions on a book draft. 

Eligibility

• Applicants must be twenty-one years of age or older.
• This fellowship opportunity is open to any writer who is not currently enrolled in a degree-granting creative writing program.
• Applicants should not have published a full-length literary book with a major publisher, university press, or other established press, or be under contract for a book. Published work in literary magazines or journals is acceptable.
• Writers from communities that are traditionally underrepresented in the publishing industry are especially encouraged to apply.

Application

• Submit between November 1 and December 15, 2024. 
• Include…

1. a project description (max 500 words). Please note any challenges or particular areas of concern within the work.
2. a poetry or prose writing sample of the project. The writing sample should be 10–15 pages (double spaced for fiction and nonfiction).
3. a recent copy of your CV.

• The application fee is $18. If this fee poses a hardship, please contact us at kenyonreview@kenyon.edu. 
• All fee-paying applicants are invited to claim a complimentary half-year Print plus Digital subscription toThe Kenyon Review (for domestic addresses) or a half-year digital subscription (for international addresses) through November 15, 2023.

Selection Process

Our Developmental Editors (members of the KR editorial team) will review the applications and select the Fellows they will work with. They will reach out to the Fellow and arrange for an initial conversation by phone or Zoom. Fellows and Developmental Editors will collaborate on a work plan, establish goals, and determine deadlines and a schedule for monthly hour-long conversations. Over the course of four months, they will meet by phone or Zoom to discuss the progress of the writing project. Winners will be announced in early 2025.