Submissions wanted (fiction, poetry, essay) | up to 16 cents per word
Added 2025-09-17 12:00:44 +0000 UTCCOMPANY/PUBLICATION: THE KENYON REVIEW
Deadline: 30 September 2025
Our Submissions portal is open between September 1 and September 30, 2025. In 2026, our magazine will feature folios on the following themes:
Alchemy
Invisible Cities
Precarity
Document
We invite work that broadly interprets these themes. When you submit, you will have the option to identify your work for general submission or the themes.
We strongly encourage submitters to familiarize themselves with work previously published by The Kenyon Review. Subscriptions are available here, and anyone can read up to five free pieces per month in our Archive.
2025 FOLIOS:
Alchemy: The NOPE Dossier
Guest Editor: Cate Marvin
I love nothing more than a word that has so many facets of meaning light leaps through it every time you think of it. Some examples that come to mind: irony, interstices, chicanery. One could write volumes entertaining the endless plentitude such words offer. Thinking about possible themes for a collection of poems, a calling forth, the idea of alchemy at once met my mind. And I think this has largely to do with the fact I’ve never been able to pin down its meaning. I know it means change. But I know that it isn’t just any kind of change. It’s change is an act of impossibly, a complete transmutation. The turning of one thing into another in one fell swoop.
Alchemy as a practice is complicated to say the least, as is its history. Be sure to brace yourself before launching into its Wikipedia page. For this dossier of poems, we are employing notions of alchemy as a means to help us creatively confront the drastic and unprecedented national and global changes that impinge upon us all. We are not interested in work that treats alchemy as a topic. Rather, we are considering alchemy as a challenge, a practice, and a belief. At the core of any definition of alchemy is impossible change; as with metaphor, one thing inexplicably becomes another. Such transformations can be scientific, mystical, divine, philosophical.
I have a theory that one of the reasons people find poetry so daunting to read is because it directly engages with alchemy. Out of words, we bring forth a muscular experience both intellectual, sensory, and emotional. Poetry stands in direct opposition to totalitarianism. I hold hard onto Frost’s aphorism: “The only way out is through.” Poetry is never more necessary than in times such as ours. We call forth all of the poets who have experienced discrimination, violence, subjugation, torture, death, silencing– we call them forth, their ghosts that are more alive than ever, to instruct us in these difficult times. They have shown us how to move. They have known what we do not yet know and what we are coming to know.One cannot sit still as the eye of a target. To do so makes no sense. To do so is ludicrous. We cannot be complacent and/or conclude that we are not affected if and only because we are not yet affected. This call for poems that enact and embody notions of alchemy should not be regarded as narrow. It is not topical. We are looking for poems that embody new ways of thinking and responding to change, which is, essentially, what poems do all the time. It may be easiest to say we are in search of poems that do not take the backseat, that do not allow the victim stance to predominate, that look for instants, exits, escape hatches, asphalt glittering beneath sun, trap doors, eggs that hatch trees that grow to blossom tiny tigers.
INVISIBLE CITIES.
This call invites texts that consider possibilities in form and language architecture. The way language shapes understanding and constructs realities. This is an opportunity to consider form, structure, blueprints, sites of memory, the body, patterns, design –aspects that undergird experience. The rich and expansive architecture of the unseen.
PRECARITY.
The precarity folio explores conditions, causes and consequences of instability. We want texts that contemplate new realities, understandings and expectations that arise in moments of upheaval, disintegration, and fundamental shift. The great tensions and possibilities, dilation of time, tipping points, notions of emergency, tightropes, free solos, gig economies, seed banks and the rise of AI.
DOCUMENT. (Previously “Who Gets to be American”)
Which. Law. Contract. Kind of belonging. History. Holds. Truth. Which records. News outlet. Camera angle. Proof. Which story. Which archive. Which map. Name. Border. Rights. Jurisdiction. Line. Treaty. Exam. Test. Measure. Inheritance. Tax bracket. Blood quantum. Raid. Ruling. Fingerprint. Neighborhood. Voting booth. Which authority. Recording. Poll. Transaction. Number. Evidence. Proof. Which judge. Which jury. Which peers. Facts. Deed. Circumstances. Edit. Remix. Filter. Version. Studio. Court. Network. Boardroom. Evidence. Data leak. Drug. Language. Receipt. Allowance. Values. Privilege. Citizen.
We do not charge a reading fee for general submissions.
We consider previously unpublished:
short fiction and essays (up to 7,500 words)
flash fiction and essays (up to 3 pieces, up to 1,000 words each; please format and submit as a single document)
poetry (up to 6 poems; please format and submit as a single document)
excerpts (up to 30 double-spaced pages) from larger works
We do consider translations in the categories and special folios and themes listed above.
Please submit your translated work to its corresponding genre (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or the appropriate theme or folio).
You may submit to more than one genre. However, please submit no more than one submission in a given genre (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama); multiple submissions in the same genre (including multiple submissions with different themes) will be disregarded.
We are not currently considering the following:
unsolicited interviews
unsolicited book reviews
unsolicited artwork
drama/scripts
emailed submissions (please use Submittable)
previously published material
Paper submissions are only available to writers who do not have ready access to the internet (including those who are incarcerated). Paper submissions for the current submissions period must be postmarked by the current submission period’s deadline and must be accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope. Send hard copies to: SUBMISSIONS, The Kenyon Review, 102 W. Wiggin St., Gambier, OH 43022
Here’s the link to our Submittable portal: https://thekenyonreview.submittable.com/submit
We pay $0.08 per published word of prose (minimum $80, maximum $450) and $0.16 per published word of poetry (minimum $40, maximum $200).
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CONTACT INFORMATION:
Submissions: Via Submittable
Website: https://kenyonreview.org/
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