Kenny Fries is the author of In the Province of the Gods (Creative Capital Literature award); The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory (Outstanding Book Award, 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 Returns: Poems Selected and New, 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, 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 and curated “Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer,” the first international exhibition on queer/disability history and culture (Schwules Museum Berlin). His work has been translated into Spanish, Polish, German, French, Greek, Ukrainian, Japanese, and Korean.

Twice a Fulbright Scholar (Japan and Germany), Kenny is recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Arts and Literary Arts Fellowship, was a Creative Arts Fellow of the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Cultural Vistas/Heinrich Böll Foundation DAICOR Fellow in transatlantic diverse and inclusive public remembrance. He has received grants from the DAAD (German Academic Exchange), Fonds Darstellende Künste (Performing Arts Fund), Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe, British Art Network, Culture Moves Europe, Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and Toronto Arts Council. He was an honoree on Diversability’s inaugural Disability Impact List. He is the recipient of a Disability Futures Fellowship from the Ford Foundation/Mellon Foundation/USA Artists.

His work-in-progress is Stumbling over History: Disability and the Holocaust, from which excerpts are featured in his video series What Happened Here in the Summer of 1940?.

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 (Toronto).