The Kenyon Review Podcast

A conversation with poet, Kenyon Review contributor, and Writers Workshop instructor Carl Phillips.

Adam Cayton-Holland talks with KR's own Katharine Weber about his new memoir Tragedy + Time, his career as a comedian, his sister's suicide, and the many influences from comic books to television that have shaped his sensibility along the path to his success.

A conversation with acclaimed author Ann Patchett plus readings from José González Prada, Jeffrey Harrison, Campbell McGrath, and Sherod Santos.

Poet Kimiko Hahn talks about the significance of translation and conceiving words as portals and playgrounds with her Peter Taylor Fellow Sylvia Beato-Davis.

Ruth Ozeki talks with Katharine Weber about her novels, her family story, and how the fictional moments in her 1995 autobiographical documentary film have since been mirrored by autobiographical elements in her fiction.

Writer and artist Lauren Redniss talks to associate editor Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky

O.Henry Prize winner and Kenyon Review editor David H. Lynn talks with Hilary Mantel, twice the winner of the Man Booker Prize, about the way historical novels are published, what it's like to live within the world of one character for more than ten years, writing for the stage, and the final book in her Thomas Cromwell Trilogy, The Mirror and the Light.

Stephanie Danler, author of best-selling novel Sweetbitter, talks to P.F. Kluge about her writing workshop at Kenyon, whether or not to read your book’s reviews, and how to make time for writing when you’re working in the restaurant industry.

Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Jew in the Lotus and The History of Last Night’s Dream, speaks with his KR Writers Workshop Fellow Jessica Kinnison about the primary imagination, the American worship of honing one’s craft, and writing from soul vs. writing from persona.

Andrew Grace discusses poetry's responsilibity to be politically engaged with Solmaz Sharif, who insists, in response to the argument that "Art will improve under Trump," that freedom is the only force that will make art better, and explains how form can be used as a means of opposing American imperialism.

A conversation with poet Maureen McLane plus readings from Scott Brownlee, Harold Schweizer, and Kimberly Gray.

Danielle Evans discusses road trip stories, the importance of plot, reading poetry as a daily exercise, and why poetry shouldn't be used as pick-up lines.

Kenyon Review fellow Misha Rai sits down with Gabrielle Bellot and Nay Saysourinho to discuss narratives that address the language of citizenship, colonialism, labels, and identity.

Acclaimed author Colm Tóibín talks to KR editor David Lynn about his research process, teaching, and the struggle for Catalan independence.

KR Editor David H. Lynn speaks with Lewis Hyde about his best-selling book The Gift, personal and cultural forgetfulness, and Hyde’s twenty-nine-year career at Kenyon. In addition to The Gift, Hyde is the author of Common as Air, Trickster Makes This World, and many other books.

In this episode, Andrew Grace talks to poet and editor Nate Marshall about Seamus Heaney's sense of place, poetry as a team sport, writing rap lyrics vs. lyric poems, and, of course, Chicago

Javier Zamora, author of the poetry collection Unaccompanied (Copper Canyon Press) and currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, talks with Andrew Grace of the Kenyon English faculty about immigration, advocating for undocumented poets, and what Salvadoran poets Americans should be reading.

Kenyon professor of religious studies, Royal Rhodes, speaks to poet, editor and Kenyon alumna, Saskia Hamilton, about Robert Lowell, the importance of silence, and Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan.

Elizabeth Dark, KR’s associate director of programs, talks with prose writer Hilary Plum about documentary fiction, the experience of reading the news, and the stories we choose to keep in our collected memory.

Each summer, Kenyon College plays host to hundreds of writers, young and old, who come to our bucolic hill in rural Ohio for the annual Kenyon Review Writers Workshops.This year, we asked some of the instructors of the adult writers workshops and their Peter Taylor fellows to have free-ranging conversations about life and craft in our recording studio. In the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing those conversations with you.For our first installment, our friend Maggie Smith talks to Ohio native, poet, biographer, and writer of nonfiction, Stanley Plumly.We hope you enjoy!