Kenny Fries In the Province of the Gods

Kenny Fries

Kenny Fries is the author of The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory and Body, Remember: A Memoir. He is the editor of Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out. His books of poetry include Desert Walking and Anesthesia. He was commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera to write the libretto for The Memory Stone, a chamber opera that premiered at the Asia Society Texas Center in Houston in 2013. Fries also wrote the text for the new music work In the Gardens of Japan, which has been performed in Tokyo, Yokohama and New York City. Fries received the Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights, was a Creative Arts Fellow of the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Fulbright Scholar to Japan. He has been awarded grants from the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council and residencies at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Fondation Ledig-Rowohlt/Chateau de Levigny in Switzerland. He teaches in the Creative Writing MFA Program at Goddard College and at the Ontario College of Art and Design University.

http://www.kennyfries.com/,


Awards & Accomplishments

  • 2013

    Award

    Kenny Fries receives an Ontario Arts Council Works-in-Progress grant for In the Province of the Gods.  

  • 2012

    Award

    Kenny Fries received a Disability Arts Travel Grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to travel to Helsinki, Finland to meet with the Duv Teatern theatre troupe and the curators of the Helene Schjerfbeck exhibit at the Ateneum National Gallery.  

  • 2012

    Commission

    Fries is commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera to write the libretto for a Japanese-themed chamber opera as part of HGO’s “East+West” series

  • 2012

    Grant

    Fries receives a grant from the Ontario Arts Council’s Writers’ Reserve program

  • 2012

    Notable Book

    Fries’s Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability is an American Library Associations Notable Book of 2012

  • 2010

    Residency

    Fries receives residency for the Chateau de Lavigny in Switzerland

  • 2010

    Residency

    Fries receives Ledig House International Writers Residency

  • 2009

    Residency

    Kenny Fries receives Yaddo residency

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