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Thomas E. Kennedy, Interviewee 
Duff Brenna, Interviewee
David Applefield, Interviewer
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Thomas E. Kennedy
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It took Thomas E. Kennedy 20 years to publish his first story, "The Sins of Generals" in Long Island University´s journal Confrontation in 1981. In the 20 years following that first publication, he has published 13 books, 100 short stories, numerous essays, poems and translations, as well as photographs, a new passion. Among other awards, he has won an O. Henry Prize in 1994, the Pushcart Prize in 1990, the Charles Angoff Award in 1988, and first prize in the Gulf Coast Short Story Contest in 2000. Some of his work has been translated into Danish, French, and Serbo-Croatian. In 1997, the University of Missouri at Kansas City (BkMk Press) published a second collection of stories, Drive, Dive, Dance & Fight, and Wordcraft of Oregon published his third novel, The Book of Angels.
About Drive, Dive, Dance & Fight, Andre Dubus affirmed that Kennedy "writes with wisdom, and it is perhaps that wisdom which turns some of his stories of great sorrow into something triumphant."
Kennedy like Brenna has lived a variety of lives--as a shoemaker´s helper, bank clerk, military stenographer, medical editor, translator, speech writer, lobbyist, writing teacher, and drifter.
Since 1974, he has lived in Europe, first in France, then in Denmark where he works as a writer and editor in the medical field while he serves as international editor of the American literary journals Cimarron Review and Potpourri, Contributing Editor of the Pushcart Prize, and as Advisory Editor of The Literary Review, for which he has guest-edited a number of special anthology issues. He has taught and read as a visitor at many American and European universities and has been a member of the fiction faculty at the Emerson College International Writing Seminar in the Netherlands since 1990. In 1987, he guest-edited a Danish selection of work for Frank 6/7.
New novels--Roaring Boys, set in Queens, New York, on the brink of the Vietnam War; Beneath the Neon Egg, set in contemporary Copenhagen; and A Passion in the Desert, the story of a sixties survivor, as well as a story collection, Mistress of the Sunrise, are under editorial consideration. He has just completed another work, Waiting for the Barbarians, A Love Story, which is a novel disguised as a guide to the bars of Copenhagen--each chapter takes place in a different watering hole. A collection of essays on the craft of fiction, Realism & Other Illusions, will be published by Wordcraft in late 2001.
Kennedy has a B.A. (summa cum laude) from Fordham University, a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from Vermont College, and a Ph.D. in American literature from Copenhagen University. He has lived in Denmark since 1975.
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