About the Author

(Note: Thomas E. Kennedy is also known in some literary contexts as Thomas Kennedy, or, in his incarnation as a song-writer, Tom Kennedy.)

• Brief Bio
• Curriculum Vitae

Brief Bio

Thomas E. Kennedy was born in New York City in 1944 under the sign of the Fish and grew up in Elmhurst and Jackson Heights, pretending he was Tom Sawyer in the Flushing Meadow swamp, catching guppies in Hellmann’s jars, paying a nickel to pass through the turnstile into LaGuardia Airport so he could stand on the exterior observation deck and watch the propeller-driven airliners lifting slowly into the sky as he dreamed of far-off places.

His father was Vice President of the Long Island City Savings Bank and wrote poetry in the evenings, his mother a retired public school teacher. Kennedy was the youngest of four siblings and was particularly devoted to his sister, older than he by eleven years. After a brief marriage, his sister returned home with her own son who was then raised in the Kennedy home. Jack was only eight years younger than Kennedy — and became the little brother he had longed for.

From 1950-57, he attended St. Bartholomew’s School in Elmhurst where he was educated by the Dominican Nuns and Franciscan Brothers, then won a scholarship to Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School (Irish Christian Brothers) from which he graduated with honors in 1961. He began studies at the City College of New York that autumn as a very young 17-year-old.

At the age of fifteen, when his father gave him a copy of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Kennedy had immediately developed an intense interest in fiction, its glimpse into the hidden world, and began reading widely — Russian, French, Irish, British, and American authors. A story by Katherine Mansfield, “Miss Brill,” so affected him at the age of seventeen that he decided he wanted to write himself.

After one semester at CCNY, he took a leave of absence with the intention of traveling around the country doing odd jobs and writing — a plan he could not manage to fulfill. Instead he volunteered to be drafted into the Army (that adventure is described in his essay, “Something to Fall Back On,” in Writers on the Job). Shortly after his discharge from the Army, his father died, and Kennedy spent several years hitch-hiking around the US, living for a few weeks or months at a time in Long Beach, San Diego, San Francisco, Stockton, and New York City’s East Village, reading and making sporadic attempts at learning to write.

Although he had an agent and received a three-year-grant from the Theodore B. Goodman Fund to complete a novel-in-progress, nothing that he wrote was accepted for publication until many years later, in 1982, when Martin Tucker of Confrontation magazine purchased Kennedy’s first story for twenty dollars — an honorarium which he used to purchase strong drink in Julio’s bar in Montpelier, Vermont, drink shared with two established writers — Andre Dubus, II, and Gordon Weaver.

This was after Kennedy had finally obtained his BA in language and literature from Fordham University Lincoln Center (graduating summa cum laude with honors in English) — 13 years after starting his studies at CCNY. Immediately after earning his BA, Kennedy had moved to Europe, where he married and became the father of two children (Daniel, 1979; Isabel, 1981), and where he also had a house and a full-time job in the international medical field.

Isabel and Daniel Kennedy, flanking the top of the Kennedy family Christmas
tree in 2006. The ivory star of David ceremoniously graces the tree each
year since 1975 to honor Kennedy’s old friend Marvin Horowitz.
The two friends met in 1968 in a CCNY philosophy class.

His first publication in 1982 motivated Kennedy to apply to the low-residency MFA program at Vermont College. He was accepted there, graduated in 1985, and invited back first as a teaching assistant and then as a faculty member until the late 1980s. In 1986, his mother died, at the age of 82. In 1988, Kennedy completed his PhD at Copenhagen University, where his dissertation was entitled, The Uses of Verisimilitude: Fiction as Imagination, Realism & Craft.

Soon he was regularly publishing books, stories, essays, translations, poems, and book reviews in American literary journals such as New Letters, Kenyon Review, The Literary Review, Sewanee Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. He also served various editorial functions for journals such as Cimarron Review, Short Story, The Literary Review, StoryQuarterly, and others. In 1990 he won a Pushcart Prize, in 1994 an O. Henry prize. Twice in 1995, Kennedy won The European short story competition and also won the Angoff Award, Gulf Coast competition, and other distinctions.

Now, Kennedy’s 20+ books and hundreds of stories, essays, poems, translations, photographs, and interviews span a quarter century and a couple of hundred magazines and anthologies. His work has won many national and international prizes and literary competitions, and has been honored by the National Conference of the organization of American Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) as well as in a documentary film produced by Harper College and in scores of reviews, essays, TV, radio, and magazine interviews.

Thomas E. Kennedy, perched on doorstep against backdrop of Dublin door
painted one of his favorite colors. — Photo by Alice Maud Guldbrandsen

Aside from his writing life, Kennedy spent a good part of 37 years working for the medical profession as an editor, speechwriter, translator, conference organizer, and administrator; and as News Editor of World Medical Journal and Managing Editor of Danish Medical Bulletin.

In this capacity, he traveled through much of the world; and in the mid-1980s, he edited publications on “Doctors, Ethics and Torture” and “Medical Aspects of Torture,” as well as the psychiatric treatment handbook developed by Copenhagen’s Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Victims — work which has informed several of his short fictions and the novel he considers the best work he has done to date, Greene’s Summer, about a Chilean torture survivor being treated in Copenhagen.

Greene’s Summer (Wynkin de Worde, 2004) is the third volume of The Copenhagen Quartet, four independent novels about the souls and seasons of Copenhagen to which Kennedy devoted a decade of work, from 1995 to 2005. The other three are: Kerrigan’s Copenhagen, A Love Story (2002), Bluett’s Blue Hours (2003), and Danish Fall (2005).

In the teaching field, Kennedy is a core faculty member of Fairleigh Dickinson University’s low-residency MFA Program. He has also taught at Vermont College’s MFA Program, the Ploughshares/Emerson College Annual Writing Seminar in the Netherlands, the biennial Geneva Writers’ Conference at Webster University, and the biennial Writers’ Conference at The College of New Jersey, as well as performed various Visiting Writer stints in many other schools, colleges, and universities.

Kennedy lives in the Danish capital, among its 1,525 serving houses (subject of one of his novels) and its many parks, castles, bookstores, and cafés. He is the proud father of a now grown son and daughter.

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