All Faculty Profiles

Z Kennedy-Lopez

by Frances Chassler

Z Kennedy Lopez sits against a hazy Zoom background, reflecting on their short story "Solomon's Knot." “I was ranch-sitting for a former professor when that piece got published, and when she read it she was like, ‘It's really all about the cat, even from the beginning,’ and I was like ‘Yeah, I don't know I would’ve put it that way but you’re right, it really was all building towards the cat.’”

Z’s writing is magical realist in content and practice. They want to “expand the scope beyond more than the human thing.” They pay as much attention to how someone treats their animals as to how they treat people. And, on a typewriter they inherited from their grandmother, they write lyrical, associative stories about queerness, the apocalypse, animals, and the environment. “The shadow” of magical realist classics—One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez and Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin “hangs over their work.” In their writing, Z asks, “What does it mean to exist in an environment? Whether that's a community or a block or a forest.”

When asked about the recurring theme of the apocalypse in their work, Z replies, “It's the material at hand.” Z views apocalypses as both symbolic and contextual. In stories and nature they are elements of a perpetual cycle, like death in winter, from which new life and ideas emerge. In a historical context, they have become the veil that obscures a reality of violence. Z says, “When we say, ‘this is an apocalypse’ you have to ask, an apocalypse for who?”

Z’s penchant for magical realism and speculative fiction came at an early age. While in middle school in their small Oregon hometown, Z read one hundred books in a year. This avid reading habit evolved into Z becoming someone with the “dubious honor of having gone to grad school twice.” When asked for their best writing advice, Z says, “Something my teacher used to say is if the syntax is snarled, you're hiding something from yourself. Write down what you say.”

Their job offer from Gotham came unexpectedly—two years after they applied—while visiting friends in Alaska. “It’s 2021, deep Covid, I’m leaving the city for the first time in a long time, I’m getting out in a big way—then I got an email from Kelly.”

Now, alongside teaching at Gotham, Z edits and publishes short stories and other writing. Since February they’ve been working on a novel inspired by their brother's dying dog and the concept of ‘shifting realities.’ “The vicarious kind of grief about having met this little demonic gremlin one time and being like, oh, you’re no longer here. That coincided with me doing some planning for teaching another class through a friend's website. Nobody registered for the class so I was like okay, cool, but I had all this thinking I had been doing, so I just was like, what if these two things snapped together and now I’m 170 pages into a novel that I didn’t expect to ever be working on. So I’ve just been trying to follow that, which feels very exciting and strange.”