Kenny Fries received the Creative Capital literature award for In the Province of the Gods. He is the author of Body, Remember: A Memoir and 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. He is the editor of Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out and the author of the libretto for The Memory Stone, an opera commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera. His books of poems include Anesthesia, Desert Walking, and In the Gardens of Japan.
Kenny’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Granta, Kyoto Journal, LiteraryHub, Electric Literature, The Progressive, Catapult, Los Angeles Review of Books, and in many other publications. He writes the disability beat column for How We Get To Next, and developed the Fries Test for disability representation in our culture. Kenny is recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Arts and Literary Arts Fellowship, and has received the Creative Arts Fellowship from 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 teaches in the M.F.A. in Creative Writing Program at Goddard College.
Portrait by Michael R. Dekker
