Pagan Kennedy

Pagan Kennedy (born c. 1963)^[1] is an American columnist and author, and pioneer of the 1990s zine movement.^[2]

She has written ten books in a variety of genres,^[3] was a regular contributor to the Boston Globe, and has published articles in dozens of magazines and newspapers.^[4][5] In 2012–13, she was a New York Times Magazine columnist.

Biography[]

Early life and education[]

Born Pamela Kennedy around 1963, she grew up in suburban Washington, D.C. She graduated from Wesleyan University in 1984, and later spent a year in the Masters of Fine Arts program at Johns Hopkins University.^{[citation needed]}

Career[]

Kennedy's autobiographical zine Pagan's Head detailed her life during her twenties.^[1]

Kennedy wrote a biography called The First Man-Made Man about Michael Dillon who in the 1940s was the first successful case of female-to-male sex change treatment; he established himself as a medical student. It describes how he later fell in love with a male-to-female transsexual, Roberta Cowell, who was at the time the only other transsexual in Britain.^{[citation needed]}

In July 2012, Kennedy was named design columnist for the New York Times Magazine.^[6] Her column, "Who Made That," detailed the origins of everything from the cubicle^[7] to the home pregnancy test.^[8] Kennedy resigned from the column after signing a contract with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to write a book, Inventology.^{[citation needed]}

Teaching[]

Kennedy was a visiting professor of creative writing at Dartmouth College,^[9] and taught fiction and nonfiction writing at Boston College, Johns Hopkins University, and many other conferences and residencies.

Personal life[]

An ovarian cancer survivor,^[10] Kennedy currently lives in Somerville, Massachusetts with her partner, Kevin Bruyneel. She previously lived with filmmaker Liz Canner, in a relationship she has described as similar to a Boston marriage.^[11]

Awards[]

Kennedy's accomplishments have been recognized many times during her career; she was a 2010 Knight Science Journalism fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was named the 2010/2011 Creative Nonfiction grant winner by the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She has also been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in fiction, a Sonora Review fiction prize, and a Smithsonian Fellowship for science writing.^{[citation needed]}

Bibliography[]

This section lacks ISBNs for the books listed in it. Please by listing ISBNs. If the {{Cite book}} or {{citation}} templates are in use, you may add ISBNs automatically, or discuss this issue on the talk page. (January 2014)

Novels[]

• Spinsters (1995) (Barnes & Noble Discover Award winner, shortlisted for 1996 Orange Prize)
• The Exes (1998)
• Confessions of a Memory Eater (2006)^[12]

Collections[]

• Stripping (1994)

Nonfiction[]

• Platforms: A Microwaved Cultural Chronicle of the 1970s (1994, reprinted by SFWP 2015)
• Zine: How I Spent Six Years of My Life in the Underground and Finally...Found Myself...I Think (St. Martin's Press, 1995; reprinted by SFWP 2014)
• Pagan Kennedy's Living: Handbook for Ageing Hipsters (1997, reprinted by SFWP 2015)
• Black Livingstone: A True Tale of Adventure in the Nineteenth-Century Congo (2002, reprinted by SFWP 2013)^[13][14] (New York Times Notable list and Massachusetts Book Award honors)
• The First Man-Made Man: The Story of Two Sex Changes, One Love Affair, and a Twentieth-Century Medical Revolution (2007)^[15]
• The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories (SFWP, 2008)
• Inventology: How We Dream Up Things That Change the World (2016)

Anthologies[]

• The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Eighth Annual Collection (1995)
• The Best Creative Nonfiction Volume 2 (2008)

Short stories[]

• Elvis's Bathroom (1989)

References[]

External links[]

• Official website
• Website for The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex
• Profile of Kennedy