We’re all on a quest to understand more about life—and so we write. We write about unrequited love, the Civil War, superorganisms, penalty kicks, global warming, bluebird feathers, Arab literature, anime, nuclear waste, neurotransmitters, game theory, Black Arts, modern democracies, LGBTQ+ cinema and more. We write not only to share our views, we write to be part of the solution.
The Best in Contemporary Writing
The Kenyon Review is one of America’s most revered literary magazines, publishing breakthrough work by prize-winning authors and daring new voices.
Kenyon Students Become Literary Tastemakers
Kenyon Review Associates rub shoulders with literary luminaries, learning invaluable editing and publishing trade secrets.
Find your outlet.
Students contribute their ideas and perspectives to more than a dozen publications, from literary and political journals to blogs.
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HIKA
Kenyon's oldest undergraduate literary publication HIKA allows students to share their voices while growing invaluable editing and publishing skills.
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Lyceum
Dreamed up by a group of naturally curious students, Lyceum is a creative science community that encourages us to share, explore and discuss our fascinations about the natural world.
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Collegian Magazine
The award-winning Collegian Magazine publishes long-form articles about Kenyon politics, culture and history, as well as photo essays, interviews and memoir pieces.
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A Medio Camino
Written and produced solely by Kenyon students, A Medio Camino empowers Spanish-speaking voices on our campus, shining a light on issues that affect the Latinx community.
Scientific Storytelling
Building on Kenyon's renowned writing tradition, this program cultivates a vibrant literary science community. Students learn how to write artfully, creatively, and with precision about the natural world, with the goal of communicating complex issues to a general audience.
Featured Courses
Science Writing
From Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” to Oliver Sacks’ “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” popular science writing brings important questions to wider public attention. In this course, you'll analyze essays that combine literary and scientific merit and learn to present scientific information in highly readable form.
Software Development
Do you see the world in code? In this course, you'll gain experience in designing, implementing, testing and debugging software. Using C++, Javascript and other languages, you'll craft quality code, develop user-friendly interfaces and build multicomponent architectures.
Image and Word: Writing About Art
Art history is an object-focused field, based on a dichotomy of the ethereal and material, subject to many different types of writing and with an elusive mystery at its core regarding the nature of the visual arts and creativity. This course is a chance to expand your knowledge of the many modes of writing about art.
Writing the Television Pilot
What makes for a good TV show and how do you get it on the air? From pilot to plot development to pitch, you'll explore what it takes to produce a successful script for television using award-winning shows like “Girls,” “Homeland” and “The Office" as backdrops.
Prose Power
Alumnae Elliott Holt '97 and Yohanca Delgado '06 are two of 35 writers to win Creative Writing Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts for their work in prose, a prestigious award whose past recipients have gone on to win the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
It's not unusual for Kenyon alumni to make repeat appearances on The New York Times’ bestseller lists or find success in the publishing industry. Explore new releases from members of the Kenyon community.
“Dancing in the Light”
“I wasn’t accustomed to the moon being bright enough to light up the world and cast vivid shadows. On an average clear night back home, the sky was virtually vacant, and was stained with the off-color orange of downtown’s constant pollution. But on top of that hill, the sky was wide and open, and we watched as the moon crawled. ”
Daniel Weiss '24
Anthropology major, River Forest, Illinois
“Beethoven’s Diving Board”
“The piano is in the center of the house, and sitting down to play feels like jumping off a diving board: jittery and exposed, but the enclosing oblivion of the deep-end waiting just one leap away. All I want to do is dive into the irrelevance of a long dead German and the expansive songs he heard in his head. Nothing, these days, is more attractive to me than the anachronism of Beethoven, his complete ignorance of pandemic or apocalypse.”
Fiona Ellsworth ’20
English
Washington, D.C.