Biography of Brendan Kiely

Brendan Kiely was born in 1977, in Boston, MA. A New York Times-bestselling author, he co-wrote All American Boys with Jason Reynolds. Kiely is also the author of Tradition, The Last True Love Story, The Gospel of Winter, and The Other Talk: Reckoning with Our White Privilege. Kiely has received the Coretta Scott King Author Honor Award, the Walter Dean Meyers Award, and was recognized on ALA’s list of Top Ten Best Fiction for Young Adults.

Kiely received an MFA from the City College of New York. He is a former high school English teacher and is now on the faculty of the Solstice MFA Program at Pine Manor College. As an English teacher, Kiely “wanted to find books that would inspire my students to take seriously and think critically about their role as citizens in our society today—books that would help them reflect on who they are and what they believe.” As an author Kiely aspires to do the same in his writing. Kiely lives in New York City with his wife and son.


Study Guides on Works by Brendan Kiely

All American Boys is a young-adult novel, co-written by American authors Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely and published in 2015. They were motivated to write the book after Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri by a white police officer...