Dan Kennedy is an American writer, and original developer of The Moth storytelling podcast in New York. [1] [2]
Dan Kennedy is an American writer, and original developer of The Moth storytelling podcast in New York. [1] [2]
Kennedy's writing first gained attention at the McSweeney's literary website and quarterly journal. He started performing on stage with New York-based storytelling collective The Moth 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 [3] 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 one 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. [4] In 2021, he served as a creative consultant on the NBC Peacock 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, [5] 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. 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". [6] [7] He discussed the book, and his time working as a Creative Director for Atlantic Records in New York, [8] with Terry Gross on NPR's "Fresh Air". [9] Kennedy's debut novel American Spirit [10] was released in 2013, receiving the coveted starred review from Publishers Weekly, [11] 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." [12] Kennedy's work has appeared in GQ Magazine and on the Peabody Award winning Moth Radio Hour, and has been widely anthologized in literary collections in Europe and the United States. [13] [14]
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