Kenny Fries

Kenny Fries is the author of In the Province of the Gods (University of Wisconsin Press, 2017), winner of a Creative Capital literature award; The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory (Da Capo Press, 2007), winner of an Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights; and Body, Remember: A Memoir (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). He edited Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out (Plume, 1997),and was commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera to write the libretto for The Memory Stone. His books of poems include Desert Walking (Avocado Press, 2000) and Anesthesia (Avocado Press, 1996).

Fries’s work has been published in The New York Times, Granta, The Believer, Kyoto Journal, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, The Progressive, Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications and anthologies. He wrote the Disability Beat column for How We Get To Next, and developed the Fries Test for disability representation. His work has been translated into Spanish, Polish, German, French, Greek, Ukrainian, and Japanese. He curated “Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer,” which opened in 2022 at the Schwules Museum Berlin.

Fries has received a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Arts and Literary Arts Fellowship, and was a Creative Arts Fellow of the Japan-US 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), Fonds Darstellende Künste (Performing Arts Fund), Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe, 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 Cultural Vistas/Heinrich Böll Foundation DAICOR Fellow in transatlantic diverse and inclusive public remembrance. He is the recipient of a 2022 Disability Futures Fellowship from the Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and USA Artists.

For 27 years, Fries taught in the MFA in creative writing program at Goddard College; he has also taught at Fordham University and OCAD University.