Daniel Laskin
When Misha Rai sat down to write the introduction for Art and the Moment, the
Kenyon Review’s special project on voting, it was natural that she would turn to personal memories. Rai has an instinct for storytelling, a style brimming with narrative warmth, and a gift for interweaving layers of time and meaning, uncovering flashes when the wider world, with its conflict and complexity, surprises ordinary life.
In this case she evoked two scenes. There is her childhood home in India, where her father would expect young Misha and her brother to read one of the family’s four newspapers every day and then grill them on stories in the various sections. And there is a somber moment in the Florida statehouse in 2017, when the state legislature posthumously exonerated the “Groveland Four,” four young African American men who almost seventy years earlier had been falsely convicted of raping a young white woman.
Admin
April began on a bittersweet note for the
Kenyon Review family, as Anna Duke Reach retired after more than fifteen years as well, the title was director of programs, but the reality was magician, collaborative brainstormer, assignment juggler, big dreamer and maker of dreams come true, graceful fixer, generous soul. Every summer she and her team brought to life the workshops that widened the literary horizons of countless writers while expanding the
Review’s mission. She also played a leading role in orchestrating
KR’s annual gala fundraising dinner in New York, held in conjunction with the presentation of the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement.
Theories of Falling as well as
Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, a disability memoir and cultural history of food allergies
. She served as the editor for
Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. Honors for her work include the 2019 Munster Literature Centre’s John Montague International Poetry Fellowship, a 2015 NEA fellowship, and five DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities fellowships. She lives in Washington, D.C.
INTRODUCTION
I’ve been thinking about beans. Stay with me. My early appetite for them was functional: a can pulled off the shelf, preferably with a pull-tab top, and dumped into a microwaveable vessel. But in the past year, I’ve gotten pretty good at cooking dried beans. Black beans, limas, flageolet. That means making my own stock onions, whole-clove garlic, chopped carrots and celery. Bay leaves make a difference. I bring to a boil, relax to a simmer, add cumin or hot sauce, and wait for that moment wh
When Chinese novelist Mo Yan accepted the Nobel Prize in Literature earlier this week, the relationship between literature and politics attracted much attention. The award is often given to writers who forcefully oppose political repression. When authors are from countries recently embroiled in political strife, or there are repressive dictatorships or socialist regimes involved, sometimes the artistic aspects of an author’s work receive less attention than they would for more famous authors. Even authors from stable, economically advanced countries are sometimes honored by the Prize as much for representing a new, repressed, or marginalized voice as for their literary achievements, leading many observers to conclude that the Nobel Literature Prize is “political.” It is very rare for the prize to be given to a citizen of a Communist country in good standing with his government; I believe Mo Yan is only the second, after the Soviet novelist Mikhail Sholokhov in 1965.
Best Poet title. Their work has appeared in
The American Poetry Review, The Baffler, The Paris Review, Mizna, and elsewhere. A graduate of Swarthmore College and Harvard University, he currently resides in Somerville, MA, where he teaches in Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College.
INTRODUCTION
One of the most important lessons I wish I’d learned earlier is the importance of establishing a reading practice. For me, this is arguably more important than a “writing practice,” which can be so hard to find when one is first starting and, furthermore, takes a lot of flux, risk, and experimentation to find a nice balance between discipline and sustainability. It’s easy to lose oneself to a vicious cycle of stagnation in such attempts at early writing process: pressuring oneself to produce without critically examining the writing, beating oneself up when poems don’t work out. But reading always nourishes my brain and soul, even when my writing stagnates and flail