Dan Kennedy is an American writer, and original developer of

The Moth The Moth is a nonprofit group based in New York City, dedicated to the craft of storytelling. Founded in 1997, the organization presents a wide range of theme-based storytelling events across the United States and abroad, often featuring promine ...

storytelling podcast in New York.

Biography

Kennedy's writing first gained attention at the

McSweeney's McSweeney's Publishing is an American nonprofit publishing house founded by Dave Eggers in 1998 and headquartered in San Francisco. The executive director is Amanda Uhle. McSweeney's first publication was the literary journal'' Timothy McSw ...

literary website and quarterly journal. He started performing on stage with New York-based storytelling collective

in 2000, going on to spearhead the development and release of The Moth podcast in 2008, serving as one of the podcast’s hosts from 2008–2020. Wired Magazine celebrated the 10th anniversary of The Moth podcast in a profile outlining its rise from two thousand subscribers to forty-six million downloads per year. In 2019, the podcast was downloaded 71 million times. In 2022, Kennedy returned for on
episode (#773)
to discuss the creation and launch of The Moth Podcast. With a background in New York advertising and the music industry, Kennedy moved into writing and consulting in film and television, selling series pilots to HBO and F/X and working on feature film assignments at Amblin, Paramount, and Amazon Studios. In 2021, he served as a creative consultant on the

NBC Peacock The NBC, National Broadcasting Company (NBC) has used several corporate logos over the course of its history. The first logo was used in 1926 when the radio network began operations. Its most famous logo, the Peafowl, peacock, was first used in ...

Original Series "True Story with Ed and Randall" and previously sat on the judging committees of the Writers Guild of America "Made in New York" Television Fellowship Program, the PEN- America Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History, and served on the readers panel of the 2025 Writers Guild of America New York Screenwriting Fellowship. In 2003 Kennedy published his first *book, ''Loser Goes First: My Thirty-Something Years of Dumb Luck and Minor Humiliation,'' with

Random House Random House is an imprint and publishing group of Penguin Random House. Founded in 1927 by businessmen Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer as an imprint of Modern Library, it quickly overtook Modern Library as the parent imprint. Over the foll ...

. A memoir followed in 2008 entitled ''Rock On: An Office Power Ballad,'' which the New York Times described as "...a succession of gently mordant vignettes, with hilariously spot-on asides about media image-making". He discussed the book, and his time working as a Creative Director for

Atlantic Records Atlantic Recording Corporation (simply known as Atlantic Records) is an American record label founded in October 1947 by Ahmet Ertegun and Herb Abramson. Over the course of its first two decades, starting from the release of its first recor ...

in New York, with Terry Gross on

NPR National Public Radio (NPR) is an American public broadcasting organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with its NPR West headquarters in Culver City, California. It serves as a national Radio syndication, syndicator to a network of more ...

's "Fresh Air". Kennedy's debut novel ''American Spirit'' was released in 2013, receiving the coveted starred review from Publishers Weekly, which heralded the book as having, "...far surpassed the creation of character and conjured an entity so alive in its knowledge of impending death that we're captured in a new idea of what it's like to live." Kennedy's work has appeared in GQ Magazine and on the

Peabody Award The George Foster Peabody Awards (or simply Peabody Awards or the Peabodys) program, named for the American businessman and philanthropist George Foster Peabody, George Peabody, honor what are described as the most powerful, enlightening, and in ...

winning Moth Radio Hour, and has been widely anthologized in literary collections in Europe and the United States.

Bibliography

Books

* ''Loser Goes First: My Thirty-Something Years of Dumb Luck and Minor Humiliation'' (Random House/Crown, 2003) * ''Rock On: An Office Power Ballad'' (Algonquin, 2008) * ''American Spirit: A Novel'' (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Littla a, 2013)

Selected anthologies

*Embrace the Merciless Joy: The McSweeney's Guide to Rearing Small, Medium, and Large Children (2023) Edited by Chris Monks, Jennifer Traig *How to Tell a Story: The Essential Guide to Memorable Storytelling from The Moth, by The Moth (2022) * The Moth Presents: Occasional Magic. True Stories About Defying the Impossible, edited by Catherine Burns (2019) * Keep Scrolling Till You Feel Something: 21 Years of Humor from McSweeney's Internet Tendency (2019) edited by Chris Monks, Sam Riley * McSweeney's Issue 50 (McSweeney's Quarterly Concern) (2017), edited by Dave Eggers * ''Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans: The Best of McSweeney's Humor'', Editors Dave Eggers, Kevin Shay, Lee Epstein, John Warner, Suzanne Kleid * ''Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records'', by John Cook, Mac McCaughan, Laura Ballance, Ray Porter * ''Humor Me: An Anthology of Funny Contemporary Writing (Plus Some Great Old Stuff Too)'', edited by Ian Frazier * ''Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times'', Edited by Kevin Sampsell * ''The Encyclopedia of Exes'', Edited by Meredith Broussard * ''The Autobiographer's Handbook: The 826 National Guide to Writing Your Memoir'', edited by Jennifer Traig * McSweeney's Issue 35 (McSweeney's Quarterly Concern), edited by Dave Eggers * ''The McSweeney's Book of Politics and Musicals'', by the Editors of McSweeney's * ''The Insomniac Reader: Stories of the Night'', Edited by Kevin Sampsell * ''The Best of McSweeney's Internet Tendency,'' Edited by Chris Monks, John Warner * ''Love Is a Four-Letter Word: True Stories of Breakups, Bad Relationships, and Broken Hearts'', Edited by Michael Taeckens * ''Mountain Man Dance Moves: The McSweeney's Book of Lists'', by the Editors of McSweeney's

References

External links

Dan Kennedy interview on NPR's Fresh Air

Dan Kennedy interview on NPR's Weekend Edition

Dan Kennedy on NPR's Ask Me Another
Bullseye with Jesse Thorn: Christopher Guest, Vampire Weekend, Dan Kennedy.

Archived work with The Moth

Archived work with McSweeney's
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kennedy, Dan American podcasters American humorists American male screenwriters Living people Year of birth missing (living people)