Kenyon Review is open for general submissions from September 1 until September 30, 2023. See information and guidelines.
The Kenyon Review was the vision of poet Roberta Teale Swartz and her husband, Gordon Keith Chalmers, who became the thirteenth president of Kenyon College in 1937. Roberta Teale Swartz, a protege and friend of Robert Frost, published two acclaimed books of poetry. She was also instrumental in recruiting John Crowe Ransom to found a literary magazine in Gambier.
From the beginning, Swartz and Chalmers had grand ambitions for The Kenyon Review, and John Crowe Ransom’s stature in the literary world gave the magazine immediate clout. The inaugural issue, published in January 1939, included work by Delmore Schwartz, Ford Madox Ford, Randall Jerrell, and Robert Lowell (then a student at Kenyon, who had transferred from Harvard to study with Ransom). During Ransom’s 21-year tenure as editor, The Kenyon Review became one of the most influential literary magazines in the English-speaking world.