Creative Writing

Kenyon’s English Department is home to a vibrant community of creative writers, and many students choose to complete the English major with an emphasis in creative writing. Through a variety of workshops in fiction, poetry, nonfiction and hybrid genres, experienced faculty support and champion students in their individual writing processes, while also helping students read historically, comparatively, theoretically, practically and aesthetically to broaden their awareness of what is possible with their creative practices.

Instructors shape their curriculum around the latest pedagogies, including centering the student writer within the community of the workshop. In addition to being dedicated teachers, our faculty members are working writers who actively publish books with large commercial publishing houses, mid-sized university presses, specialty imprints, and small and independent presses. Their work frequently appears in literary and critical journals, national newspapers and magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, BOMB Magazine, Boston Review, Lit Hub, The Brooklyn Rail, The Los Angeles Review of Books, New American Writing, Denver Quarterly, The Beloit Fiction Journal, Passages North, Ninth Letter, Mid-American Review, Indiana Review, Post Road, The Sun, and Creative Nonfiction.

Holding positions at a range of literary and scholarly publications such as The Kenyon Review, Disability Studies Quarterly, Jacket2, Sweet: A Literary Confection, and Journal of Modern Literature, faculty also bring to the classroom rich editorial experience.

Our approaches continue to stay fresh and diverse with support from The Kenyon Review Fellows Program, in which fellows reside in Gambier for two years while working on significant writing projects and teaching creative writing courses in the English Department.

Our dynamic teaching is also supported by robust programming that brings a multiplicity of working practitioners to campus each year; recent guest have included Leila Aboulela, Teddy Wayne, Tomás Q. Morín, Allison Cobb, Gabrielle Civil, Stephen Kuusisto and Divya Victor, among many others.