Excellence in Writing

GAMBIER, Ohio (March 5, 2004) The Kenyon Review, one of the nation's leading literary magazines, has announced the four winners of its Peter Taylor Fellowships for 2004. The fellowships, which were established in 2003, provide full tuition at the Review's Writers Workshop, an annual event scheduled this year for Saturday, June 19, through Sunday, June 27, on Kenyon's campus. In addition to attending this year's Writer's Workshop the fellowship winners will assist in instruction and offer public readings from their work.

The fellowships in fiction have been awarded to Sheri Joseph of Atlanta, Georgia, and Alix Ohlin of Newport, Rhode Island. An assistant professor of English at Georgia State University, Sheri Joseph has seen her short stories published in The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, and other leading magazines. Alix Ohlin, writer-in-residence at the Portsmouth Abbey School, is also the author of numerous published stories, as well as book reviews and articles on a variety of topics.

In poetry, the fellowships have been awarded to Victoria Chang of San Diego, California, and Shin Yu Pai of Watertown, Massachusetts. Currently a student in the M.F.A. program at Warren Wilson College, Victoria Chang has published her poetry in such diverse magazines as Crab Orchard Review, Kalliope, and The Nation. Shin Yu Pai, who often teaches poetry classes and leads workshops, has won numerous awards for her work. She has published three books of her poetry, Ten Thousand Miles of Mountains and Rivers, Equivalence, and this year's Works on Paper.

The Peter Taylor Fellowships honor one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. A 1940 graduate of the College, where his mentor was the Kenyon Review's founding editor, John Crowe Ransom, Taylor was the author of genre-defining short stories published in The New Yorker and leading literary magazines for five decades. His work was collected in such books as A Long Fourth and Other Stories and The Old Forest and Other Stories. Taylor, who died in 1994, is also remembered for his novel A Summons to Memphis, published in 1987 and awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the Ritz/Hemingway Prize. He taught for many years at the University of Virginia, where the Kenyon Review's current editor, David Lynn, studied with him in the late 1970s.

The Kenyon Review seeks to publish the work of emerging writers from diverse backgrounds along with the work of the some of the world's finest established writers. The Review's Writers Workshop was developed to afford serious writers the time, setting, and community necesasry to practice and develop their art.