Why We Chose It
By David Baker, Poetry Editor
 On Solmaz Sharif’s “Personal Effects”
Each time the question invariably makes sense. I’m at a workshop or taking part in a panel discussion or a class, and someone asks about my work as Poetry Editor of The Kenyon Review: “So, what are you really looking for?” The expectation is that I provide a rubric for excellence, or at least a means to getting a poem published in KR, or at least some rationale for my own personal tastes and intentions as a poetry editor. It is a well-meaning, sensible question, and yet I have no sufficient answer.
Join KR at AWP in Boston!
Visit us March 6-9, at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference at the Hynes Convention Center and Sheraton Boston Hotel. Check out our schedule of events!
KR Launches New Writers Workshop For Teachers
Designed for high school teachers who love to write, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop for Teachers, June 29-July 3, 2013, combines the generative spirit of the Kenyon summer writing workshops with a new focus on classroom practices meant to encourage student creative writing. Our five-day intensive program is part writers’ retreat and part professional development, exposing teachers to prompts and strategies meant to inspire their own work as well as the work of future students. Come to reconnect with your own inner writer—the one often lost beneath piles of grading!—and leave with new work and new techniques for incorporating creative writing and contemporary literature into your classroom teaching.
Looking for a Summer Place to Write? Join Us For Two Innovative New Summer Writing Workshops!
KR is now accepting applications for two new summer workshops: a unique workshop devoted to literary hybrids and book arts, which will take place during KR’s acclaimed Writers Workshop, June 15-22, 2013, and an intensive novel workshop, June 29-July 3, 2013. Join us this summer, and expand your writing horizons!
Two Great Reads from the KR Fellows
Please join us in celebrating the publication of two first books of poetry by our KR Fellows: Chord Box: Poems by Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers, out from University of Arkansas Press on February 1, 2013, and No Object by Natalie Shapero, available from Saturnalia on March 12, 2013.
Sink Your Teeth Into KR!
The Kenyon Review Brings Sexy Back! ( Way Back!) 
KR’s Spring 2009 issue was recently included in Gulf Coast’s list of The Top 16 Sexiest Lit Mag Covers in the Last 6 Years. The post described the cover, a photo of a reader enjoying a 1945 issue of KR, as “pure class, and yet so meta.”
So, do you think we’re sexy?
In Spring 2001 (Vol. 23, No. 2), The Kenyon Review celebrated the centennial of the Nobel Prize with a special issue devoted to The Cultures of Creativity. 1995 Laureate Seamus Heaney contributed this meditation on violating boundaries in search of the springs of inspiration.
The Kenyon Review, New Series, Spring 2001, Vol. XXIII, No. 2 Castalian Spring
by Seamus Heaney
Thunderface. Not Zeus’s ire, but hers
Refusing entry, and mine mounting from it.
This one thing I had vowed: to drink the waters
Of the Castalian Spring, to arrogate
That much to myself and be the poet
Under the god Apollo’s giddy cliff—
Don’t miss the buzz! Twitter is full of shout-outs for this tell-all essay by a former Sweet Valley High ghostwriter/PhD student.
The Ghost Writes Back
by Amy Boesky
There was nothing surprising about my professor’s lecture on Shakespeare until, out of the blue, she started talking about ghostwriting. I was in the back of the packed auditorium with the other teaching assistants. Taking notes, working fast to revise my plans for discussion section the next day in response to what she said in lecture. The ghostwriting reference stopped me short.
Tatau (Tattoo) Poetics
Last week my Theory and Form of Poetry course discussed Somatic Poetics, so this week we discussed Tatau poetics, or the poetics of the tattoo. Specifically, we read Samoan author Albert Wendt’s famous essay, “Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body” (1996). This essay draws an analogy between Samoan tattooing practices and (post)colonial Pacific literature.
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