Poet, Scholar, and Project Curator, B. A., English and American Literature at Brandeis University; M. A. Playwriting at Columbia University
kennyfries@kennyfries.comKenny Fries is the author of In the Province of the Gods, which received the Creative Capital literature award; The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory, winner of the Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights; and Body, Remember: A Memoir. He edited Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out and was commissioned by Houston Grand Opera to write the libretto for The Memory Stone. His books of poems include In the Gardens of Japan, Desert Walking, and Anesthesia.
Kenny’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Granta, The Believer, Kyoto Journal, LiteraryHub, Electric Literature, The Progressive, Catapult, Los Angeles Review of Books, and in many other publications and anthologies. He wrote the Disability Beat column for How We Get To Next, and developed the Fries Test for disability representation in our culture. His work has been translated into Spanish, German, French, and Japanese.
Kenny is recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Arts and Literary Arts Fellowship, and was a Creative Arts Fellow of the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has twice been a Fulbright Scholar (Japan and Germany), and has received grants from the DAAD (German Academic Exchange), Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and Toronto Arts Council. He was an honoree on Diversability’s inaugural Disability Impact List and a DAICOR Fellow in transatlantic diverse and inclusive public remembrance, a program of Cultural Vistas and the Heinrich Böll Foundation. He is the recipient of a 2022 Disability Futures Fellowship from the Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and USA Artists.
His work-in-progress is Stumbling over History: Disability and the Holocaust, excerpts which are featured in his video series What Happened Here in the Summer of 1940? He is also currently co-curating “Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer,” which will be the first international exhibition on queer/disability history and culture, opening at the Schwules Museum Berlin on September 1, 2022. For 27 years, Kenny taught in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Goddard College, and he has also taught at Fordham University and OCAD U.