Gender and Sexual Minorities and Allies (GSMA) Celebration 2021
Monday, October 18—Saturday, October 23
GSMA & Disability Awareness Month Keynote Speaker: Kenny Fries
Wednesday, October 20 | 4 p.m. | Chandler Ballroom A/B, University Center
If you would prefer to attend this event virtually, please use the registration form to receive a link.
Kenny Fries is the author of In the Province of the Gods, which received the Creative Capital literature award; The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory, winner of the Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights; and Body, Remember: A Memoir. He edited Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out and was commissioned by Houston Grand Opera to write the libretto for The Memory Stone. His books of poems include In the Gardens of Japan, Desert Walking, and Anesthesia.
Kenny’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Granta, The Believer, Kyoto Journal, LiteraryHub, Electric Literature, The Progressive, Catapult, Los Angeles Review of Books, and in many other publications and anthologies. He wrote the Disability Beat column for How We Get To Next, and developed the Fries Test for disability representation in our culture. His work has been translated into Spanish, German, French, and Japanese.
Kenny is recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Arts and Literary Arts Fellowship, and was a Creative Arts Fellow of the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has twice been a Fulbright Scholar (Japan and Germany), and has received grants from the DAAD (German Academic Exchange), Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and Toronto Arts Council. He was an honoree on Diversability’s inaugural Disability Impact List.
His work-in-progress is Stumbling over History: Disability and the Holocaust, excerpts which are featured in his video series What Happened Here in the Summer of 1940?
He teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Goddard College.
For more information, contact the James Farmer Multicultural Center at 540/654-1044 or umwjfmc@gmail.com. Visit students.umw.edu/multicultural.
Please email us at umwjfmc@gmail.com if you have any questions regarding disability-related accommodations.