The Kenyon Review Poetry Contest

We will be accepting poetry manuscripts between November 1 and December 31, 2025. 

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. These can be from a cohesive project or a sampling of your work. Submissions will be judged on the strength of the work as a whole, not on an individual poem. Please send us your best and strongest work.
• 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 December 31, 2025. 
• 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 February 15, 2024. Your new half-year subscription to The Kenyon Review will include the Spring 2026 and Summer 2026 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.

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

2025 KR Poetry Contest Judge: Leila Chatti

Leila Chatti was born in 1990 in Oakland, California. A  Tunisian-American dual citizen, she has lived in the United States,  Tunisia, and Southern France. She is the author of the debut full-length  collection Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), winner of the  2021 Levis Reading Prize, the 2021 Luschei Prize for African Poetry, and  longlisted for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award, and the chapbooks Figment (Bull City Press, 2022), The Mothers (Slapering Hol Press, 2022), Ebb (New-Generation African Poets, 2018) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya, the 2017 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. Her second full-length collection, Wildness Before Something Sublime, is  forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in Fall 2025. She holds a B.A.  from the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan  State University and an M.F.A. from North Carolina State University,  where she was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize. She is the  recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the  Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New  Mexico, and fellowships and scholarships from the Fine Arts Work Center  in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Tin  House Writers’ Workshop, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, the Sewanee  Writers’ Conference, The Frost Place Conference on Poetry, the Key West  Literary Seminars, Dickinson House, and Cleveland State University,  where she was the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing and  Publishing. Most recently, she was the Grace Hazard Conkling  Writer-in-Residence at Smith College. Her poems have received prizes  from the Pushcart Prize, Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest, Narrative’s 30 Below Contest, and the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize, among others, and appear in The New York Times Magazine, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, POETRY, The Nation, The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, Narrative Magazine,  and other journals and anthologies. In 2017, she was shortlisted for  the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, and in 2023 was  recognized with the Young Alumni Award at Michigan State University. She  currently teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific  University and is a Provost Fellow at the University of Cincinnati,  where she lives.

Thanks for your interest in The Kenyon Review!