A Little About Kevin
Kevin attended Luther College in Decorah, Iowa for two years before becoming a college drop-out. He then moved to St. Paul, Minnesota and eventually found unlikely work as an assistant preschool teacher, an experience which proved both exhausting and enormously fun. He ultimately returned to school, earning a BA from Hamline University with departmental distinction in both English and Music. During this time, he worked as a high school debate coach, a teaching assistant at Hamline, and on the before- and after-school staff at the Friends School of Minnesota. Upon completing his undergraduate education, Kevin returned to his pattern of unemployed wandering, finding himself living across from a tobacco field in the booming metropolis of Sunderland, Massachusetts, just outside of Amherst. He stumbled into a gig as a middle/high school choir director. Slightly shaken, he made a swift retreat to academia, earning an MM in Composition from the University of Massachusetts, while simultaneously working as the Program Assistant at the History Workshop of Historic Deerfield, Massachusetts. He bid a sad farewell to New England, but was happy to return to Minnesota to pursue a PhD in Musicology.
Thankfully, that process is nearing its completion, as he plans on defending his dissertation on Rufus Wainwright and reparative queer perspectives on cultural history in the next few months.
Kevin's forthcoming scholarly publications deal with issues of sexuality, hate crimes, violence, and "underground" music-making. Come back in the near future for links to these publications and check out the "Kevin's Academic Street Cred" link for his publication list.
In his previous life as a literary critic, Kevin presented papers on the fiction of Octavia Butler, Nella Larsen, Gloria Naylor, and Toni Morrison, and he still hasn't shaken his love of James Baldwin and Salman Rushdie. On the musical front, he has been privileged to have had numerous performances of his compositions, including the premiere of Soliloquy for Distance, his song-cycle for chamber ensemble, which included members of the Minnesota Orchestra, and a series of performances by the exceptionally talented Chi-Young Hwang of his Wallingford Suite for solo violin.
In his spare time, Kevin mostly obsesses about things, but also reads, writes, and occasionally paints. He likes to believe family and friends find him equally annoying and entertaining, though truthfully, the proportion varies by individual. He tries to live by the words of Oscar Wilde: "It's absurd to divide people into good or bad. People are either charming or tedious."