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 multimedia 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 earned several prizes from 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 and a Publishing Triangle Award.
In 2018, she was awarded a Poynter fellowship in journalism at Yale University.
She is currently collaborating with filmmaker Harriet Hirshorn on a film portrait of Ana María Simo. She is also finishing an illustrated libretto, Life and the Bees, interacting with Maurice Maeterlinck’s La vie des abeilles.
She lives in Paris, France.