The Kenyon Review Short Nonfiction Contest

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!