Kelley McKenna is a writer, scholar, and educator based in New York City, where she grew up. Her work explores how people come to believe what they believe and how they learn to think freely again. She writes about grief, coercive belief systems, and the long afterlife of trauma, often in hybrid and short-prose forms.
She holds a PhD in English and Creative Writing from Aberystwyth University in Wales (2024). Her doctoral research drew on Robert Jay Lifton’s work on thought reform to examine how ideology and charismatic authority reshape perception and identity, and how literature and open access to ideas can help restore intellectual autonomy. She also holds an MA in Liberal Studies (Poetry) from Dartmouth College, where her thesis was nominated for the Byam Shaw-Brownstone Award; an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts; and a BA in English and Theatre from Norwich University.
Her book Fainting Bee: a memoir in shorts follows a woman through her husband’s illness and death and the years of wandering that came after, from Reykjavík and Ljubljana to Prague, Venice, and Montreal. First published as Cobbled Bridges by Arson Press in 2022, the book’s revised second edition will be published in November 2026 by RUE, the small press Kelley founded. RUE publishes books about sorrow, joy, and what can still grow. Her prose poems have appeared in River Teeth, River River, Apeiron Review, little somethings press, and the Dartmouth Literary Journal. She is currently revising her memoir about coming of age between New York and California in the 1970s and ’80s.
Kelley was a Fulbright Fellow in Creative Writing in Ljubljana, Slovenia (2015–2016), and a writer in residence at the NES Artist Residency in Skagaströnd, Iceland, in 2019, 2021, and 2023. In 2026 she judged Best First Book for the Independent Book Publishers Association.
For more than twenty years, Kelley has taught across the full arc of learning, from early childhood to the university. She has taught writing at Dartmouth College and English composition at Ozarks Technical Community College, and she teaches humanities at Southern New Hampshire University, where her courses examine censorship, bias, and power in culture and media. As Head of Youth Services at a public library in South Carolina, she championed young readers’ access to a wide range of books and viewpoints. Earlier, she founded and directed a children’s theatre and taught literature and performance as a Waldorf class teacher and teaching artist.
Some of her earlier publications and her Fulbright appear under the name Kelley McKenna Rossier.
