MARGARET ATWOOD TO RECEIVE KENYON REVIEW AWARD FOR LITERARY ACHIEVEMENT
The Board of Trustees of the Kenyon Review will honor Margaret Atwood as the 2007 recipient of the Kenyon Review Award for Literary 
Achievement at a gala dinner on Thursday, November 8, at the Four Seasons restaurant in New York City. Members of the literary community and other luminaries are expected to be on hand, including past winners of the award. Following the dinner, Atwood will travel to Gambier, Ohio, to give the keynote presentation at the first annual Kenyon Review Literary Festival.
Atwood, whose poetry, fiction, and nonfiction books are among the most widely read and influential across the globe, is the author of such acclaimed novels as The Edible Woman (1970); The Handmaid’s Tale (1983); Cat’s Eye (1989); The Robber Bride (1994); Alias Grace (1996); and The Blind Assassin (2000). Alias Grace, The Handmaid's Tale and Cat's Eye were each shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. The Blind Assassin was awarded the Booker in 2000. The Sunday Times praised Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, as “superlatively gripping, remarkably imagined.” It, too, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2003.
Among her many awards are Woman of the Year by Ms. magazine (1986), Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (1987), the Humanist of the Year (1987), the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence (1994), and Government of France’s Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1994).
The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement was first presented in 2002 to novelist E.L. Doctorow, a 1952 graduate of Kenyon, who is known for such works as The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, and Loon Lake and more recently for The March. In 2003 the recipient was novelist and short-story writer Joyce Carol Oates, author of Wonderland, Do With Me What You Will, and We Were the Mulvaneys, among many other titles. In 2005, Seamus Heaney, recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature, received the award. In 2006, KR honored Roger Angell, the renowned baseball writer who has also been fiction editor of the New Yorker, and Umberto Eco, the Italian author of such best-selling novels as The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum. Last year’s recipient was novelist Ian McEwan, author of the Booker Prizewinning Amsterdam and the National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award winning Atonement.
Proceeds from the dinner, and from the live auction that accompany it, ensure the legacy of one of America’s most revered literary journals. It also supports scholarships and fellowships to KR's summer writing programs, the Writers Workshop for adults and the Young Writers program for high-school students. The magazine’s literary outreach programs include the Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers, established in 2003, which attracts thousand of entries from across the globe.
For more information about the 2007 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, please email KR..
LITERARY FESTIVAL GENERATES EXCITEMENT
Preparations continue for the first annual Kenyon Review Literary Festival to be held in Gambier, Ohio. Demand for tickets has been
extraordinary, and tickets for the festival’s keynote event, The Denham Sutcliffe Memorial Lecture: An Evening with Margaret Atwood, sold out by mid-September. (We anticipate that some additional seating will become available on the evening of the event.)
Scheduled for November 9-10, the festival complements the sixth annual Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, which will take place on November 8 in New York City. The award recipient this year is Margaret Atwood. Atwood will then travel to Gambier, Ohio, to give the Festival's keynote presentation.
The festival will also host the Midwest Literary Magazine & Small
Press Fair in conjunction with the Council of Literary Magazines &
Presses
Click here for a complete list of all Literary Festival events.
YOU ARE INVITED TO SAVOR "LA DOLCE VITA" (THE SWEET LIFE) AT THE KENYON REVIEW WRITERS WORKSHOPS IN ITALY, MAY 26 - JUNE 2, 2008!
Inspiration abounds in the charming medieval village of Vitorchiano (in the Tuscia region) where three workshops will be offered each morning. 
Come read and write poetry with David Baker. Or perhaps you'd prefer to write some fiction of your own with David Lynn (author, professor and editor of The Kenyon Review) or create literary nonfiction of your own with author Rebecca McClanahan. Accommodations at Hotel Piccolo Opera include a private room, with private bath, and three meals a day featuring traditional Italian fare. There will be two excursions to nearby sites, as well as time for participants to plan their own day trips to Rome or Florence via train. The cost of this eight-day trip is $3,250, which includes tuition, room, and all meals. Airfare is not included. Deadline for applications is March 15. If you have questions, please email kenyonreview@kenyon.edu or phone (740)427-5207. We hope you will join us!
Click here to view a slideshow of photos from the 2005 workshop.
The 5th Annual Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers contest sponsored by The Kenyon Review begins November 1. The contest is open to high school sophomores and juniors throughout the world.
The winner and two runners-up will see their poems published in KR. The winner will also receive a full scholarship to KR's Young Writers workshop in Gambier, Ohio, next summer. Semi-finalists will be featured online at www.kenyonreview.org
To enter, visit www.kenyonreview.org between November 1 – 30, 2007. You’ll find a special log-in section to register your name and contact info, and to upload your poem (info will be used solely for KR and Kenyon College). Note: Only one unpublished poem, one entry per person. You must be a high school sophomore or junior to enter.
NEW FOUNDATIONS
Students in the first year of the KR’s new Writing and Thinking at Kenyon pre-orientation program for first-year students at Kenyon College submitted pieces they’d written during the program in August for burial in the foundations of Neff Cottage, the KR’s new home in Gambier. In ancient times, a sacrifice was placed in the foundations of any important building; these students offered their writing to help lay the foundations of the KR’s new home. The students’ pieces were placed in a Nalgene bottle by KR Program Director Anna Duke Reach, and deposited in the concrete blocks that make up the building’s foundation, getting both the students and the KR off to a good start in their new homes.
A CONVERSATION WITH PETER CAREY
by Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais
[This web-exclusive interview is the first in a continuing series of web-exclusive reviews and interviews to appear on the KR Web site.]
When Sidney Nolan’s paintings of Australian bushranger Ned Kelly appeared at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, Peter Carey played tour guide. He showed the paintings to his American friends, telling them Kelly’s story and its role in Australian history and legend. Through his retelling, Carey realized the power of Kelly’s story. This led him to write True History of the Kelly Gang, his second Booker Prize-winning novel.
Throughout his career, which spans story collections, a young-adult book, several works of nonfiction and nine novels, Carey has remapped his country’s landscape, often reinventing history though tales of tricksters, legends, and suburbanites in order to find the hidden layers that construct the emotional life of Australia.
Peter Carey lives in New York City. Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais spoke with him at his home in 2003 and again in Melbourne and New York in 2006.
Jennifer Levasseur & Kevin Rabalais: You’ve talked about wanting to become an organic chemist when you were a university student, but you faked your experiments because they were too much of a hassle. Were those your first experiences in writing fiction?
Peter Carey: It’s a neat way to think about it, and of course it would have been, but I was just desperate. Have you ever tried to fake a science experiment? It is so hard. You’d think it would be easy. Maybe you want to get the result for the value of G, which is 980. But you don’t want to get that exactly. You want to get about 900. So it is like a work of fiction. The Periodic Table has an extraordinary beauty. Structure does predict performance and character.
WINTER 1964
The 100th issue of The Kenyon Review was dedicated to the magazine’s’ founding editor John Crowe Ransom and to the memory of his associate editor, Philip Blair Rice. Among the submissions were five poems by Robert Lowell dedicated to Ransom’s memory and his influence as critic, poet, and teacher. As the following poem suggests, memory is more than loss and regret: it is also a form of learning, a light left on for us, and an awareness of our own passage through the world’s endless moment.
THE LESSON
Robert Lowell
No longer to lie reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles,
while the high mysterious squirrels
rain small green branches on our sleep!
All that landscape, one likes to think it died
or slept with us, that we ourselves died
or slept then in the age and second of our habitation
The green leaf cushions the same dry footprint,
or the child’s boat luffs in the same dry chop,
and we are what we were. We were!
Perhaps the trees stopped growing in summer amnesia;
their day that gave them veins is rooted down—
and the nights? They are for sleeping now as then.
Ah the light lights the window of my young night,
and you never turn off the light,
while the books lie in the library and go on reading!
The barberry fruit sticks on the small hedge,
cold slices the same crease in the finger,
the same thorn hurts. The leaf repeats the lesson.
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Think of this section as a bulletin from KR in which we brag about the accomplishments of the extended KR family and leave out the gall-bladder surgeries.
The Kenyon Review and Editor David Lynn were recognized with the 2007 James P. Barry Ohioana Award for Editorial Excellence by the Ohioana Library Association.
Six KR authors have been named finalists for the National Book Awards: Lydia Davis in fiction, and poets Linda Gregerson, Robert Hass, David Kirby, Stanley Plumly, and Ellen Bryant Voigt. Interviews with each of them are available at the National Book Awards website.
Brad Kessler was awarded the 2007 Dayton Literary Peace Prize in Fiction , recognizing the power of the written word to promote peace, for his novel Birds in Fall. In her award citation, Amy Hempel, the 2007 finalist judge, noted that “In this novel, Brad Kessler does not spotlight the subject of peace and understanding. Rather, as the poet Mark Doty has said, it is the lens through which we see the world. Not explicit--implicit. This humane stance, so beautifully rendered, is why we chose Birds in Fall as the winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.” An excerpt from Birds in Fall was printed in the Spring 2006 issue of The Kenyon Review, and an interview with Brad Kessler by KR Fiction Editor Nancy Zafris is available on the KR’s website. Kessler will also be an instructor at the 2007 KR Writers Workshop.
Lynn Ahrens new musical, “The Glorious Ones,” adapted from a novel by Francine Prose, is in previews at Lincoln Center Theater in New York City. The show will run through Jan. 6th. Her essay "One-man Show," which appeared in Narrative Magazine and is currently available in their archive, has just been nominated for this year's Best American Essays and Pushcart anthologies. Another piece, "Going Hollywood" is forthcoming in Narrative in February.
Kenyon Review Trustee Betsy F. Ashton was recognized by The Society of Professional Journalists its highest honor, the 2007 Wells Memorial Key award. A veteran New York newswoman and documentarian, Ashton was recognized for her work as President of the New York Deadline Club, Vice President of the Sigma Delta Chi Foundation, as well as her service on the SPJ Board and the Campaign for Ethical Journalism committee.
Mary Jo Bang’s fifth collection of poems, Elegy, was published on October 16 by Graywolf Press. She highly recommends John Gallaher's The Little Book of Guesses, the winner of the 2005 Levis Poetry Prize, selected by Henri Cole and published by Four-Way Books in 2007. Mary Jo writes, “Gallaher is able to walk the tightrope between non-sequitur and linearity, between a knowing approach to the world and a whimsical ironic tone. He has things to say and the way he says them makes us stand back and say, ‘Yes, exactly. It's just like that.’ We knew it but we needed to hear it said.”
"Gate C22," a poem from Ellen Bass’ new book, The Human Line (Copper Canyon Press) will be read by Garrison Keillor on his radio show, The Writer's Almanac on Monday, November 5.
Margo Berdeshevsky's
Jennifer Chang’s first book of poems, The History of Anonymity, is forthcoming in Spring 2008 from the University of Georgia Press, as part of the new VQR Poetry Series. An article about the new series is in the new Poets & Writers. Jennifer is also a recipient of a 2007 Poetry Fellowship from the Virginia Commission for the Arts.
John Michael Cummings’ debut novel, The Night I Freed John Brown, will be published by Philomel Books (Penguin Group) in May of 2008.
Mark Allen Cunningham reads from Lost Son, his new novel about Rainer Maria Rilke, at KQED radio's author podcast, "The Writer's Block."
Gerald Duff’s new collection of short stories, Fire Ants, will be published next month by NewSouth Books. He will participate in the Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville, the Southern Kentucky Book Festival in Bowling Green, and the On The Brink Festival in Jacksonville, Florida over the next few months.
Robin Ekiss has been awarded a 2007 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award for emerging women writers. Her first-book manuscript was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and second runner-up for BOA Editions' A. Poulin Jr. Prize. She has work forthcoming in TriQuarterly, The Atlantic Monthly, and American Poetry Review, and she will be an Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in 2008.
Beth Ann Fennelly has won a 2007 United States Artist Award. A short film of one of her poems appears on the foundation’s website. Her new book, Unmentionables, will be published by W.W. Norton in April.
Rachel Hadas’ poem “I.D. Photo” appeared on Garrison Keillor’s radio show, The Writer's Almanac for Tuesday, October 23. A scene from her translation of Racine's tragedy "Iphigene en Aulide" is forthcoming in Literary Imagination, the journal of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics . She recommends “the splendid blogging at the Poetry Foundation's website.”
Cynthia Haven has received the 2007/08 Milena Jesenská Journalism Fellowship and a Kosciuszko Foundation grant to conduct research in Krakow, Warsaw, and Vienna for her forthcoming book, Czeslaw Milosz: Memories and Recollections.
Suckerpunch, the first novel by David Hernandez will be published by HarperCollins next year. He has new poems forthcoming in FIELD and The Cincinnati Review.
Nancy Honicker's article "Beneath the Veil" appeared as the feature article in the September-October 2007 edition (no. 21) of the international art review FMR. In her article, Honicker explores the biblical and classical roots of the Christian veil. In another article, "Taking the Veil," to appear in Portland Magazine in spring 2008, she presents interviews with young women, students at the university in the Parisian suburb where she teaches, who wear the Muslim veil.
Alice Hoffman's new novel, The Third Angel, will be published in April by Shaye Areheart Books (Random House) in the US and by Chatto&Windus in the UK.
Roy Kesey recently had a good week, with his new novel, All Over coming out the same week as The Best American Short Stories 2007, which included his story "Wait," first published in the Fall 2006 issue of The Kenyon Review.
An essay by Elizabeth Lantz entitled "Becoming Visible" appeared in the Spring 2007 issue of American Literary Review and was reviewed on NewPages.
Don Lee received the inaugural Fred R. Brown Literary Award for emerging novelists from the University of Pittsburgh in November. His new novel, Wrack and Ruin, will be coming out in April from W.W. Norton.
Shara Lessley received the 2007-2008 Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, as well as the Moondancer Fellowship in Nature and Outdoor Writing from The Writers' Colony. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, Fence, and Mid-American Review, among others. Her interview with the poet David Roderick will appear in the next issue of Gulf Coast.
Phillis Levin has recently published poems in The Atlantic Monthly (October 2007), Global City Review, and Barrow Street. She was awarded a 2007 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts to work on her fifth volume of poems, Zeno in the Dark. Her fourth book of poems, May Day, will be published by Penguin Books in May 2008. That same month, she will be getting married to Jack Shanewise, Director of cardiothoracic anesthesiology at the Columbia University Medical School.
Kate Maloy’s first novel, Every Last Cuckoo, will be published by Algonquin in January, and she has essays forthcoming in two anthologies, Choice (MacAdam/Cage) and For Keeps (Seal Press).
Western Kentucky University has selected Man Martin’s debut novel, Days of the Endless Corvette, for its One Community, One Campus, One Book program in 2008.
Sandra Meek’s third collection of poems, Biogeography, was the winner of the Dorset Prize and will be published by Tupelo Press in 2008. Deep Travel: Contemporary American Poets Abroad, an anthology of thirty-four poets whose work has been enriched by international travel, was published by Ninebark Press in 2007.
Jeffrey Meyers' life of Samuel Johnson will be published by Basic Books in October 2008. He's now writing a biography of Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, a chapter of which will appear in the Yale Review next year.
Jennifer Militello’s first book-length manuscript, History of the Always Pain, was awarded the 2007 Tupelo Press First Book Prize and will be published in Spring of 2009.
Ben Miller’s essay "The Butter Mint Gun" will appear in AGNI (#66) and a short story--"70th"--will also premiere in turnrow.
D. Nurkse received a 2007 Guggenheim fellowship. His next book, The Border Kingdom, will be published by Knopf in 2008, and new poems are forthcoming in New Yorker, Paris Review, and Poetry. In 2007, he was elected to the board of directors of Amnesty International-USA. He writes, “These days, I'd recommend reading anything by Hannah Arendt, and Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy.”
Anne Panning recently traveled to Flannery O'Connor's hometown of Millidgeville, Georgia to be recognized as the 2006 Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for her book Super America: Stories, which was just published by The University of Georgia Press and has been chosen as a BookSense Pick for November 2007.
Stanley Plumley’s new book, Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography, will be published in April by W.W. Norton.
Kevin Rabelais’ novel, The Landscape of Desire, will be published by Scribe Publications in Australia early next year.
A full production of Yasmine Rana's play, The War Zone Is My Bed premiered in the autumn at La MaMa E.T.C. in New York as part of the theatre's Experimenta series celebrating ten years of plays developed through La MaMa's reading series. The second act of the play, "Blackened Windows" will be published by TDR: The Drama Review in the spring issue of 2008, while the third act, "Kabul Revisited" will be published in the fall 2007 issue of Blackbird. Yasmine's new play, Paradise will premiere in November in New York at The Looking Glass Theatre. Yasmine recently participated in Hofstra University's Day of Dialogue V where she read excerpts from War Zone. A radio interview about the play and its global issues may be accessed on Hofstra University's radio station.
Michelle Richmond's
Steven Schwartz’s essay “Tabula Rasa” received the Cleanth Brooks Prize in Nonfiction from The Southern Review for the journal’s best essay of the year. He has new fiction appearing in or forthcoming from TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, and North American Review.
Maurya Simon’s new volume of poems, Cartographies, is forthcoming in January 2008 from Red Hen Press in Los Angeles. She will be a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome in November 2007. She recommends the following books of poems: Dreaming the End of War, by Benjamin Alire Saenz (Copper Canyon Press, 2007). “This is a moving and searching suite of poems located in the borderlands between the U.S. and Mexico, and exploring our human proclivity for violence. Ultimately, the poems move toward the possibility of reconciliation and peace.” Messenger: New & Selected Poems, 1976-2006, by Ellen Bryant Voigt (W.W. Norton & Co., 2007). “Voigt is on of our greatest contemporary masters. Her work is deeply complex, technically dazzling and eloquent, richly voiced, and brilliantly evocative.” We Generous, by Sebastian Matthews (Red Hen Press, 2007). “This is a big-hearted book about jazz in particular, and life and music, in general. The poems are honest, compelling and beautifully rendered.”
Lisa Russ Sparr has two new books coming out this spring: Satin Cash: Poems (Persea Books, 2008), and All That Mighty Heart: London Poems (University of Virginia Press, 2008). A list of her recommended readings appears in a column that she recently wrote for the UVA magazine.
Willard Spiegelman’s two most recent books How Poets See the World (Oxford UP) and Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt (Columbia UP) have been released in paperback. Forthcoming are Imaginative Transcripts: Selected Literary Essays (Oxford), and Pursued By Happiness (Farrar Straus). A piece he wrote about the journal Parnassus in the Wall Street Journal brought out of the woodwork the anonymous donor who single-handedly saved the journal from the wrecker's ball for two more years.
Arthur Sze just returned from the 2007 Pamirs Poetry Journey: The First Chinese-English Poetry Festival at Yellow Mountain in China, where he published poems in English and Chinese translation in their bilingual anthology. He is also a featured reader at the Second Pacific Poetry Festival in Hualian, Taiwan, next week and has recent poems published in English and Chinese translation in their festival anthology. He has new poems forthcoming in Conjunctions, Poetry East, Kyoto Journal, and Narrative Magazine. An interview with Arthur was just published in the fall issue of Sojourn.
Daniel Tobin has poems coming out in Agenda (England), American Poetry Review, Image, The Laurel Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The New Republic, Salmagundi, The Southwest Review, and Stand (England). He also has three edited volumes appearing this year: The Book Of Irish American Poetry From The 18th Century To The Present (University Of Notre Dame Press), Light In Hand: Selected Early Poems Of Lola Ridge (Quale Press) and Poet's Work, Poet's Play: Essays On The Practice And The Art (University of Michigan Press).
G.C. Waldrep is the recipient of a 2007 NEA Fellowship. His second collection of poems, Disclamor, is now out from BOA Editions.
Jonathan Weineret’s first book, In the Mode of Disappearance, was selected by Brenda Hillman for the 2006 Nightboat Poetry Prize, and will be published by Nightboat Books in April 2008. He has poems appearing shortly in 32 Poems, Harvard Review, Bellingham Review, Third Coast, The Laurel Review, and The Modern Review.
The Kenyon Review is supported in part by generous grants from the Ohio Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Smart Family Foundation, and the New York Times Company Foundation.
