Kenny Fries

[Image Description: Gold centered text on a black background with gold confetti reads, “The D-30 Disability Impact List. Below, centered black text in a gold box reads, “2020 Honoree”. Below, left, white centered text reads, “Kenny Fries”. Below, centered in a gold box, black text reads, “Germany”. To the right, a color headshot of Kenny with a white outline. In the bottom left corner, the white Diversability logo with “#D30DisList” centered below in white text.]

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Kenny Fries (he/him)

Writer

Germany

Kenny Fries is a pioneer in disability culture. He edited Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out, the first multi-genre anthology of US writers with disabilities to be published by a “mainstream” press and his work deals with issues from intersectionality to Darwin’s theory of evolution to the relationship between disability and the Holocaust. He created the Fries Test for disability representation in our culture and was the Disability Beat columnist for How We Get To Next. This year, he highlighted the 80th “anniversary” of Aktion T4, the Nazi program that killed disabled people with articles about this in The New York Times and The Believer, and did a reading tour to highlight this still unknown part of disability. Performance artist Perel invited him to collaborate them on stage in “Life (Un)worthy of Life,,” presented in Berlin, Germany. Most recently, he published the audio text “Disability Can Save Your Life” about the impact of COVID on people with disabilities. Learn more about his work.