Kenyon Review

Kenyon Review
source
Title	Kenyon Review
Frequency	Quarterly
Category	Literary magazine
Publisher	Kenyon College
Firstdate	1939
Country	United States
Base	Gambier, Ohio
Language	English

Kenyon Review is a quarterly American literary magazine founded in 1939 at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. It has published poetry, fiction, essays, and reviews by emerging and established writers and has been associated with major figures in 20th- and 21st-century letters. Over decades it has intersected with institutions, awards, and movements including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the MacArthur Fellowship, and the development of creative writing programs at universities such as Iowa Writers' Workshop and Stanford University.

History

Founded by novelist and critic John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College in 1939, the magazine emerged during debates that involved the New Criticism, the Fugitive Poets, and literary debates linked to journals like The Southern Review and Sewanee Review. Early editors and contributors included members associated with Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Randall Jarrell, and connections to the broader milieu of Oxford, Mississippi and Southern literary networks. After Ransom, editors including Robie Macauley and David A. Wagoner steered the journal through postwar shifts that paralleled expansions at institutions such as Columbia University and Harvard University. In the late 20th century, editorial leadership reflected changing landscapes influenced by editors who had ties to Princeton University, Yale University, University of Michigan, and international literary centers like Paris and London. The 1990s relaunch under a new editorial team corresponded with digital-era developments alongside periodicals such as Granta and The Paris Review. The magazine’s evolution continued into the 21st century amid affiliations with arts funding bodies including the National Endowment for the Arts and foundations like the MacArthur Foundation.

Editorial Mission and Content

The magazine has pursued an editorial mission to publish rigorous creative work, critical essays, and translations that engage readers and writers who follow award circuits such as the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Man Booker Prize. Content spans contemporary poetry, short fiction, literary nonfiction, and reviews that converse with work from poets and novelists associated with T. S. Eliot, Wendell Berry, Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, and postwar novelists linked to John Updike and Philip Roth. The periodical has run special issues devoted to regions and movements—linking to histories in Ireland, Latin America, South Africa, and interactions with diasporic writers from Nigeria and India—and has published translations of writers associated with Gabriel García Márquez, Derek Walcott, Pablo Neruda, and Yukio Mishima.

Notable Contributors and Works

Over its history the magazine has published early and landmark pieces by figures who later won prizes and held posts at institutions like Yale University, Columbia University, and Harvard University. Contributors have included poets and novelists tied to the Pulitzer Prize and the MacArthur Fellowship such as James Tate, Adrienne Rich, Louise Glück, Philip Levine, Ralph Ellison, Amy Hempel, Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore, Kazuo Ishiguro, Don DeLillo, Joyce Carol Oates, Sandra Cisneros, Junot Díaz, R. K. Narayan, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Toni Morrison, John Ashbery, Anne Carson, Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, Tracy K. Smith, Ocean Vuong, Salman Rushdie, Vladimir Nabokov, E. L. Doctorow, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, Richard Wright, Zadie Smith, Michael Ondaatje, Cormac McCarthy, Elena Ferrante, Marilynne Robinson, Hanya Yanagihara, George Saunders, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Clarice Lispector, Italo Calvino, Roberto Bolaño, Rainer Maria Rilke, W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Anne Enright, Edna O'Brien and Paul Auster. Several individual works first appeared in the journal and later contributed to collections and awards at outlets and institutions such as Knopf, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Penguin Random House, and university presses.

Awards and Programs

The magazine administers prizes and selects contributors for awards that intersect with national programs such as the National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and honors connected to the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. It runs contests for poetry and fiction similarly timed to prize seasons including the Whiting Awards and the NEA Literature Fellowships. Associated residencies, conferences, and partnerships have involved universities like Kenyon College, Ohio State University, and arts centers such as the Library of Congress and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Publication and Distribution

Published quarterly from Gambier, Ohio by an imprint of Kenyon College, the magazine is distributed in print and digital formats and appears in library collections at institutions such as Library of Congress, British Library, New York Public Library, and university libraries at Princeton University and University of California, Berkeley. Subscriptions and single-copy sales have placed the journal alongside titles like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper's Magazine on newsstands and in academic course reserves for programs at Iowa Writers' Workshop and writing centers at University of Iowa.

Controversies and Criticism

The magazine has faced controversies that echoed wider debates in literary culture, including disputes over editorial decisions similar to public debates that affected journals like The Paris Review and controversies over representation that paralleled critiques leveled at institutions such as Columbia University and publishers including Knopf and Faber & Faber. Criticism has addressed diversity and inclusion relative to movements associated with Black Lives Matter, discussions around canon formation reminiscent of disputes involving New York University curricula, and occasional backlash to particular editorial choices mirrored in coverage by outlets like The New York Times and The Guardian.

Category:Literary magazines published in the United States