Pagan Kennedy

Pagan Kennedy is an author and pioneer of the 1990s zine movement, along with writer/publishers like Lisa Crystal Carver of Rollerderby, Jim Goad of ANSWER Me! and Larry Crane of Tape Op. Her autobiographical zine Pagan's Head detailed her life. The author of ten books in a variety of genres, she is "[a] regular contributor to the Boston Globe, and has published articles in dozens of magazines and newspapers, including several sections of The New York Times" and the Boston Magazine. She has served as a visiting professor of creating writing at Dartmouth College. She also has taught writing -- fiction and nonfiction -- at Boston College, Johns Hopkins University, and many other conferences and residencies.

Born as Pamela Kennedy, she graduated from Wesleyan University in 1984, and later spent a year in the Masters of Fine Arts program at Johns Hopkins University. A native of suburban Washington DC, Kennedy currently lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, with her partner, Kevin Bruyneel. She previously lived with filmmaker Liz Canner in a set-up she has described as similar to a Boston marriage.

She wrote a biography, The First Man-Made Man, about Michael Dillon who, in the 1940s, survived the world's first female-to-male sex change treatment and 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.

Bibliography

Novels

• Spinsters (1995) (shortlisted for 1996 Orange Prize)
• The Exes (1998)
• Confessions of a Memory Eater (2006)

Collections

• Stripping (1994)

Non fiction

• Platforms: A Microwaved Cultural Chronicle of the 1970s (1994)
• Pagan Kennedy's Living: Handbook for Ageing Hipsters (1997)
• Black Livingstone: A True Tale of Adventure in the Nineteenth-Century Congo (2002) (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)
• The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories (2008)

Anthologies containing stories by Pagan Kennedy

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

Short stories

• Elvis's Bathroom (1989)

External links

• Official Pagan Kennedy site
• "So, Are You Two Together?" - Ms. Magazine article by Pagan Kennedy.
• 1998 Publisher's Weekly profile
• Website for The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex