Our Submissions portal is open between September 1 and September 30, 2025. In 2026, our magazine will feature folios on the following themes:

• Alchemy
• Invisible Cities
• Precarity
• Who Gets to Be American?

We invite work that broadly interprets these themes. When you submit, you will have the option to identify your work for general submission or the themes.

We strongly encourage submitters to familiarize themselves with work previously published by The Kenyon Review. Subscriptions are available here, and anyone can read up to five free pieces per month in our Archive.

We do not charge a reading fee for general submissions.

We consider previously unpublished:

• short fiction and essays (up to 7,500 words)
• flash fiction and essays (up to 3 pieces, up to 1,000 words each; please format and submit as a single document)
• poetry (up to 6 poems; please format and submit as a single document)
• excerpts (up to 30 double-spaced pages) from larger works

We do consider translations in the categories and special folios and themes listed above. 

Please submit your translated work to its corresponding genre (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or the appropriate theme or folio). 

You may submit to more than one genre. However, please submit no more than one submission in a given genre (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama); multiple submissions in the same genre (including multiple submissions with different themes) will be disregarded. 

We are not currently considering the following:

• unsolicited interviews
• unsolicited book reviews
• unsolicited artwork
• drama/scripts
• emailed submissions (please use Submittable)
• previously published material

Paper submissions are only available to writers who do not have ready access to the internet (including those who are incarcerated). Paper submissions for the current submissions period must be postmarked by the current submission period’s deadline and must be accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope. Send hard copies to: SUBMISSIONS, The Kenyon Review, 102 W. Wiggin St., Gambier, OH 43022

Here’s the link to our Submittable portal: https://thekenyonreview.submittable.com/submit

We do not accept revisions to submissions. Do not send new drafts unless requested to do so by an editor.

Simultaneous submissions are permitted, but please notify us immediately if the work has been accepted elsewhere by messaging us through Submittable and indicating which pieces are no longer available. If the entire manuscript is unavailable, please withdraw the piece. We cannot consider additional work in the place of withdrawn work.

We read every submission, and because we receive so many submissions per year, response times will vary according to the volume of submissions. We aim to respond to all submissions within six months of receipt. Feel free to query us at kenyonreview@kenyon.edu for an update if after six months of submitting work if you do not hear from us. Thank you in advance for your patience.

Authors will receive a contract upon acceptance and payment upon publication. Authors retain copyright to their work published in The Kenyon Review.

Submitting work to The Kenyon Review adds you to our mailing list. You may unsubscribe from this list at any time.

Please be sure to add kenyonreview@kenyon.edu to your contacts so that you can receive correspondence from us about your submission.

If you are unable to submit because you have not verified your email address with Submittable and have not received a verification notification, we recommend adding notifications@email.submittable.com to your safe-sender or contact list and attempting email verification again. The Submittable forms require email verification for security purposes. If you continue to experience issues, we recommend you submit a Submittable support request; the support team usually responds quite quickly and can send you your individual verification link directly.

We pay $0.08 per published word of prose (minimum $80, maximum $450) and $0.16 per published word of poetry (minimum $40, maximum $200).

We generally follow the Chicago Manual of Style and Webster’s latest New Collegiate Dictionary.

Thank you for sharing your work with us!