2007 Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers Begins in November
The fourth annual Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers will begin accepting entries in November. The prize, which is open to high school sophomores and juniors throughout the world, is juried by David Baker, KR's poetry editor.
More than 1,000 entries were received last year, with the winner, Justine Li of California, receiving a scholarship to KR's popular Young Writers summer workshop. The top three poems are published in KR, as well.
Students are invited to submit one poem via an online program beginning November 1. Visit KR's web site for a link to the contest submission page at that time. The contest will close on November 30.
High school teachers are encouraged to pass along this information to sophomores and juniors.
It's That Time Again...
On September 1, KR began accepting submissions from writers. The "reading period" (the time when we accept and read submissions) runs through January 31, 2007. Please, please, please read the guidelines before submitting your work. You'll find important information about how to submit your writing (i.e., not via email or snail mail but through our special online program). You'll also find a special FAQ that includes troubleshooting tips.
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.
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Andrea Seigel's new novel To Feel Stuff (Harcourt) was released last month. She also has a story in KR's Fall 2006 issue. Bonus tip: Check out her hilarious web site, replete with medicine cabinet in which to snoop.
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Judith Strasser's full-length collection The Reason/Unreason Project won the Lewis-Clark Press Expedition Award and will be published later this year. Also, an anthology she co-edited with Robin Chapman, On Retirement: 75 Poems, will be published by University of Iowa Press in 2007.
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Alice Hoffman has two books forthcoming: Incantation, a teen novel about the Spanish Inquisition, will be published by Little Brown in October, and Skylight Confessions, a novel, will also be published by Little Brown in January of 2007.
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Charles Harper Webb's new book of poetry, Amplified Dog, was published this year by Red Hen Press.
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Daniel Stern, novelist, teacher, and cellist, is celebrated with a well-deserved Festschrift—A Book For Daniel Stern—this fall (Sheep Meadow Press). The book includes contributions from Edward Albee, Elie Wiesel, Frank Kermode and other literary hotshots.
- Henry Hart is editing the Thomson Anthology of American Literature (1945-present), which will be published in 2007. His poetry book, Background Radiation, which was a finalist in the National Poetry Series, will be published in 2007 by Salt.
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KR Enters the Blogosphere
We've plunged deep into cyberspace with a blog of our own. Ably led by lit blogger extraordinaire Ms. Liz Loppato, the KR crew has already logged in plenty of news/views from the literary world.
If you haven't visited yet, check out KR Editor David Lynn's introduction and our bloggin' bios.
The Editor’s Confessions
About the Slush Pile
Contributed by David Lynn
Ask anyone involved with literary publishing what’s the biggest, most wearying task they face. Sooner or later they’ll confess.
Sooner, actually.
It’s the seemingly endless, the truly endless slog through the so-called “slush pile.” There we find the unsolicited manuscripts that appear by the tens and dozens and, yes, thousands. Each manuscript represents the hopes of an author out there somewhere, in this country or beyond, who dreams that this will be the one, snatched aloft in the trembling hand of a grateful editor with a cry of “Eureka!”
I’ve spent thirty years sharing those same hopes with every story, every novel manuscript I’ve launched into the ether. As I read the unsolicited submissions that come to my desk I try never to forget the author who stands silently behind each one.
This burden is shared by journals and commercial magazines and book publishers too. Except here’s a dirty little secret: most commercial publishers don’t bother to read the slush pile anymore. It’s not in their interest, not in their mission. It’s not necessary to finding what they’re after. They can rely on literary agents to do the weeding for them.
The new reading period at KR began September 1, and over the course of the next five months we will receive thousands and thousands of unsolicited manuscripts. And we will read each and every one.
It’s not easy.
Often, late at night or on a silent weekend afternoon in the office, the reading poem after story after memoir can become bone wearying.
Until a few years ago I glanced at every single manuscript myself after
it had been opened and logged, assigning the submissions to different readers, keeping many for myself, all for fear of making a mistake, sending back a gem that we ought to publish.
I now accept that we will make mistakes. So much of what comes in is truly wonderful and deserving. But with a small staff and loyal cadre of contributing editors to read the submissions, which grow in number every year, mistakes are inevitable. All I can do is shrug and accept that, and hope that we don’t make the more grievous error of publishing something in KR that’s not up to the highest standards, what we’re always striving for with all our might.
So why do we do it? Truth is, we could publish a wonderful journal with just the material that comes from authors we know or whom we’ve published before.
We do it because it is in our interest, is in our mission. It is necessary to finding what we’re after.
There are few feelings in the world as good—and I’ve experienced this often enough now, sometimes when I’m weariest and at the end of my rope—as reaching toward the sky with my trembling hand (okay, I know this is a little over the top, but hey) and crying “Eureka!” It does happen.
Last year, you may recall, two out of a total of twenty short stories that received the prestigious O. Henry Prize were first published in KR. That’s quite an achievement, given that we were up against the toughest competition in the world. But what’s more astounding is that both those stories were unsolicited. Both came from the slush pile. Eureka.
FROM
THE
ARCHIVES
In 1956, the National Book Club winners were Ten North Frederick, John O'Hara, fiction; An American in Italy, Herbert Kubly, nonfiction; The Shield of Achilles, W. H. Auden, poetry. In the summer, Egypt took control of Suez Canal, instigating what would become the 1956 War and ending 10 years of armed truce between Israel and the Arab states. In October, Israel launched an attack on Egypt's Sinai peninsula, driving toward the Suez Canal. In November, Soviet troops and tanks crushed anti-Communist uprisings in Hungary. Gone With the Wind was broadcast on television for the first time as 52 percent of American television households watched. In a 1956 interview, popular astrologist Jeane Dixon said a Democratic President, elected in 1960, would die in office. A first-class stamp cost three cents. The national debt was $272 billion. Allen Ginsburg wrote Howl and John F. Kennedy wrote Profiles in Courage.
The Summer 1956 issue of KR featured "Greenleaf" by Flannery O'Connor. The story won the O. Henry Prize the following year. Here is "Greenleaf" in full:
greenleaf
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
MRS. MAY'S bedroom window was low and faced on the east and the bull, silvered in the moonlight, stood under it, his head raised as if he listened—like some patient god come down to woo her—for a stir inside the room. The window was dark and the sound of her breathing too light to be carried outside. Clouds crossing the moon blackened him and in the dark he began to tear at the hedge. Presently they passed and he appeared again in the same spot, chewing steadily, with a hedge-wreath that he had ripped loose for himself caught in the tips of his horns. When the moon drifted into retirement again, there was nothing to mark his place but the sound of steady chewing. Then abruptly a pink glow filled the window. Bars of light slid across him as the venetian blind was slit. He took a step backward and lowered his head as if to show the wreath across his horns.
An Interview with Meghan O'Rourke
by David Baker
[This interview is part of a series of conversations with authors who have work in KR. It is funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.]
MEGHAN O’ROURKE is one of the brightest new voices in contemporary poetry and American culture. She grew up in Brooklyn, New York, earned her B.A. from Yale in 1997, and that summer began her literary career at the New Yorker, first as an editorial assistant, then in 2000 as an editor. Since 2002 she has served as culture editor for Slate, and in 2005 was named co-poetry editor, with Charles Simic, of the Paris Review.
In April 2007, W. W. Norton will publish O’Rourke’s first book of poetry, Halflife. Readers will find individual poems of hers in the New Yorker, the New Republic, the Yale Review, the New York Review of Books, and her prose in Poetry, the New York Times Book Review, Slate, the LA Times Book Review, and elsewhere.
O’Rourke’s poetry is sophisticated but accessible—remarkably so, on both accounts, for someone so young. Readers will notice an impressive formal range, from short lyric poems—even haiku—to longer narrative sequences. O’Rourke’s poetry makes use of literary allusions, rich tropes, and presents a wide historical range and cultural aptitude; but she is capable, too, of personal narratives that bear great tenderness and vulnerability. These are fairly uncommon traits in the work of younger and emerging American poets. We are pleased to feature five poems from Halflife in the Fall 2006 issue of The Kenyon Review. We are pleased as well for the opportunity to present this interview to our readers.
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.
