Dan Kennard is a fiction writer and teacher living outside Kansas City, Kansas. Several of his short stories have been published in literary journals like Straylight, Five:2:One, The Offbeat, Weirderary, Word Riot, and the Tahoma Literary Review, among others. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida Atlantic University.
His main influences as a writer have been people like Paul Auster, John Barth, Stephen Millhauser, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, George Saunders, and Kurt Vonnegut. There are, of course, many others. He also takes influence from music, and has worked these last several years on his latest collection In Plain Sight (2020) with the idea that it was his own LP of short fiction. His spiritual approach to life is mainly informed by the concepts of Taoism and Buddhism, especially Zen, and it's concerns with the idea of Self and Reality are a major thematic component in this first collection as well.
When he is not writing or teaching or being a dad to his two amazing children and a husband to his incredible wife, he reads and experiments with various art projects around the house and/or listens to records on his 1965 Magnavox Astro-Sonic turntable that he restored last spring. He also writes album reviews for Spill Magazine, an online music journal based out of Toronto, Canada. He cleans the house a lot, too.
You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram @kennardistry or contact him at kennardistry@gmail.com
