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. His books of poems include In the Gardens of Japan, Desert Walking, and Anesthesia, and he edited Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, The Believer, Los Angeles Review of Books, Lit/Hub, and more. He was commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera to write the libretto for The Memory Stone.
Twice a Fulbright Scholar (Japan and Germany), Fries 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 received grants from the DAAD (German Academic Exchange), Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and Toronto Arts Council. He was a 2021 DAICOR Fellow in transatlantic diverse and inclusive public remembrance, a program of Cultural Vistas and the Heinrich Böll Foundation. His current work-in-progress is Stumbling Over History: Disability and the Holocaust, excerpts of which are the basis of his video series “What Happened Here in the Summer of 1940?” He is currently curating “Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer,” an exhibit on queer/disability history, activism, and culture that opens at the Schwules Museum Berlin on September 1, 2022.