Prize-winning journalist and author of The Odysseys of Fally Dogswell and Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger, Kelly Cogswell set out from Kentucky armed only with an electric typewriter, a stack of poems, and willingness to scrape by as a maid, dishwasher, prep cook and temporary secretary.
In New York, following an unscheduled (and naked) performance that stunned the NYU Department of Performance Studies, she decided to put her Medusa-like powers to good use, first as a lesbian activist, and later, as an independent journalist and monger of extremely underground art.
Co-founder and co-editor of The Gully online magazine (2000-2006), her work has appeared in a range of venues including the International Herald Tribune, EatingWell, Louisville’s Courier-Journal, and THIS WAY OUT: the international lesbian & gay radio magazine. Her column in New York’s Gay City News has been recognized by the New York Press Association.
She was awarded the Joan Heller-Diane Bernard Fellowship for her project documenting the Lesbian Avengers. And her book, Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, a Publishing Triangle Award, and was also featured on The 2015 Over the Rainbow Project book list.
In 2018, she was awarded a Poynter fellowship in journalism at Yale University.
She is currently at work on several projects, including an illustrated libretto, Life and the Bees, interacting with Maurice Maeterlinck’s La vie des abeilles, and a new memoir, A Word of Our Own, which explores the word lesbian in a narrative about her body and life.
Her substack, Kelly At Large, occasionally offers letters from Paris (and elsewhere).