Dan Kennedy (author)


Dan Kennedy is an American author, stage performer, and host of The Moth storytelling podcast in New York.

Biography

Kennedy's writing first gained attention at McSweeney's, a literary website and quarterly journal. He started performing on stage with New York-based storytelling collective The Moth in 2000, going on to become a host of the popular live events and instrumental in developing The Moth podcast. In 2018, Wired Magazine celebrated the 10th anniversary of the podcast in outlining its rise from two thousand subscribers to forty-six million downloads per year. In 2019, the podcast was downloaded 71 million times.
In 2003 Kennedy published his first book, Loser Goes First: My Thirty-Something Years of Dumb Luck and Minor Humiliation, with Random House. A memoir followed in 2008 entitled Rock On: An Office Power Ballad, which the New York Times described as "...a succession of gently mordant vignettes, with hilariously spot-on asides about media image-making". He discussed the book, and his time working for Atlantic Records in New York, with Terry Gross on NPR's "Fresh Air". Kennedy's debut novel American Spirit was released in 2013, receiving the coveted starred review from Publishers Weekly, which heralded the book as having, "...far surpassed the creation of character and conjured an entity so alive in its knowledge of impending death that we're captured in a new idea of what it's like to live." Kennedy's work has appeared in GQ Magazine and on the Peabody Award winning Moth Radio Hour, and has been published in multiple literary anthologies in Europe and the United States.
In 2015 Kennedy began writing in television and film, and has sat on the judging committees of the PEN America Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History, and the Writers Guild of America East “Made in New York” Fellowship Program.

Books