The Kenyon Review Fellowships

A graduate of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, Jennifer Galvão’s short fiction has been published in The Masters Review. She is the recipient of the Geoffrey James Gosling Novel Prize and a Hopwood Novel Award. She is at work on a story collection and a novel about shellfish, dementia, and Portugal’s Carnation Revolution.

Cindy Juyoung Ok is the author of Ward Toward (forthcoming from Yale University Press, 2024), chosen by Rae Armantrout for the 2023 Yale Series of Younger Poets. A former high school physics teacher, Ok now teaches creative writing at the college-level. 

Elinam Agbo was born in Ghana and grew up in Kansas. She is a graduate of the University of Chicago and the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, where she co-founded MQR Mixtape, an online imprint of Michigan Quarterly Review. A member of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop Class of 2019, she has been awarded the 2018 PEN/Dau Short Story Prize, two Hopwood Awards for Short Fiction and Nonfiction, and the Les River Fellowship for Young Novelists. She has received recognition and support from Aspen Words, the Clarion Foundation, and the Hurston/Wright Foundation, among others. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in The Bare Life Review, American Short Fiction, Nimrod, and elsewhere. She is working on her first book, a novel about shapeshifting mothers, which draws upon African diaspora folklore to investigate questions of inheritance, displacement, and memory.

Cristina Correa is a writer and educator from Chicago, where she served at-risk and marginalized youth, recovering addicts, artists, and scholars for more than a decade. She has received fellowships from CantoMundo, Hedgebrook Foundation, and VONA/Voices, among other honors. Her poetry has been published, broadcast, and exhibited in venues including the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, Missouri Review, TriQuarterly, Obsidian, NPR’s Latino USA, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. Her poem “Reflection from a Bridge” was selected by former US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith in the Best New Poets series. She holds degrees in creative writing and Latinx studies, and most recently earned an MFA at Cornell University. She is currently at work on her first collection of poems.

Molly McCully Brown is the author of the poetry collection The Virginia State Colony For Epileptics and Feebleminded (Persea Books, 2017), which won the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize and was named a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2017, and the essay collection Places I’ve Taken my Body (Persea Books, 2020). With Susannah Nevison, she is also the coauthor of the poetry collection In The Field Between Us (forthcoming from Persea Books, 2020). Brown has been the recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, a United States Artists Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship and the Jeff Baskin Writers Fellowship from the Oxford American magazine. Her work has appeared in Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, New York Times, and elsewhere.

Misha Rai is a Shirley Jackson Award nominee, whose novel-in-progress has received support from the Whiting Foundation, the Ucross Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Dana Award in the Novel Category. She is the first-ever and only fiction writer to be awarded a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies for creative work. She has been an Edward H. and Mary C. Kingsbury Fellow and has been the recipient of the George M. Harper Award. Her essay, “To Learn About Smoke One Must First Light a Fire,” has been listed as a Notable Essay in the 2019 Best American Essays anthology. Her prose has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies. She was born in Sonipat, Haryana and brought up in India.

Keith S. Wilson is an Affrilachian Poet, a Cave Canem fellow, and a graduate of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. He serves as Assistant Poetry Editor at Four Way Review and Digital Media Editor and Web Consultant at Obsidian Journal. Wilson holds an MFA in poetry from Chicago State University and was recently selected as a Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry by the Adroit Journal. His debut collection, Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press. His poetry, which has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award, appears in Blueshift Journal, American Letters & Commentary, 32 Poems, Drunken Boat, Cider Press Review, and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, among others.

Jaquira Díaz is the author of Ordinary Girls, a memoir, and I Am Deliberate, a novel, both forthcoming from Algonquin Books. She was a 2016-18 Kenyon Review Fellow, and is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, two MacDowell Colony Fellowships, and many other fellowships. Her work appears in The Best American Essays 2016, Rolling Stone, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s MFA Program in Creative Writing, and Consulting Editor at the Kenyon Review. ​

Margaree Little is the author of Rest (Four Way Books, 2018), winner of the 2018 Balcones Poetry Prize and the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. She is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Tyrone Guthrie Center, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Her criticism appears in American Poetry Review and Kenyon Review Online, and her poems appear in American Poetry Review, New England Review, Missouri Review, Southern Review, and Quarterly West, among other journals.

Jamaal May is a poet and editor from Detroit, MI where he has taught poetry in public schools and worked as a freelance audio engineer and touring performer. His first full-length collection, Hum (Alice James Books, 2013), received the Beatrice Hawley Award and an NAACP Image Award nomination. Other honors include the 2013 Indiana Review Poetry Prize and a 2011-2013 Stadler Fellowship. Jamaal’s poems appear in such publications as The New Republic, Poetry, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, and Best American Poetry.

Melinda Moustakis is the author of Bear Down, Bear North: Alaska Stories, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award. She is the recent recipient of the Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington fellowship at George Washington University and the Rona Jaffe Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library and is currently a visiting professor at UC Davis. She has a story anthologized in the forthcoming This Side of the Divide: Stories of the American West and is at work on a novel and story collection. 

Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers is the author of Chord Box (University of Arkansas Press, 2013), finalist for both the Miller Williams Prize and the Lambda Literary Award. A new book of poetry is forthcoming in 2020. Her creative nonfiction was recently chosen for the Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017 and Best American Travel Writing 2017 anthologies. Most recently, Rogers was the Murphy Visiting Fellow in English-Creative Writing at Hendrix College from 2016-2019. She is a Contributing Editor at the Kenyon Review and a volunteer for the Veterans’ Writing Project.

Natalie Shapero is the Professor of the Practice of Poetry at Tufts University. Her most recent poetry collection is Hard Child (Copper Canyon, 2017), which was shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize. Her previous collection, No Object (Saturnalia, 2013), received the Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award. Natalie’s writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Poetry, and elsewhere, and she is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship.

Recipients of the original Kenyon Review literary fellowships

Poetry

• Edwin Watkins (1953)
• W.S. Merwin (1954)
• Edgar Collins Bogardus (1955)
• Douglas Nichols (1955)
• Ruth Stone (1956)
• Delmore Schwartz (1957)
• James Wright (1958)
• Theodore Henry Holmes (1958)

Fiction

• Flannery O’Connor (1953, 1954)
• George Lanning (1954)
• Howard Nemerov (1955)
• Andrew Lytle (1956)
• James F. Powers (1957)
• Elizabeth Spencer (1957)
• Robie Macauley (1958)

Criticism

• Irving Howe (1953)
• Richard W.B. Lewis (1954)
• Richard Ellmann (1955)
• Leslie Fiedler (1956)
• Theodore Hoffman (1956)
• Frances Fergusson (1957)
• Thomas Henry Carter (1958)