Lawrence Kessenich is a playwright, poet, essayist, novelist, and former amateur actor. He has had sixteen 10-minute plays produced at festivals, and one of them, Ronnie’s Charger, won the People’s Choice Award in a national competition in Durango, Colorado His full-length play Anne Frank Lives! was shortlisted for the Ashland New Play Festival. Kessenich studied theatre at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and acted in amateur productions in Wisconsin and Massachusetts, including the roles of Tessman in Hedda Gabler and Chulkaturin in The Journey of the Fifth Horse. His poetry has been widely published in magazines and in four books, and in 2010 he won the Strokestown International Poetry Prize in Ireland. He has also published a number of essays, reading “In My Father’s Tears” on NPR’s This I Believe, after it was published in an essay anthology. His first novel, Cinnamon Girl, was published in 2016. Kessenich lives in Watertown, Massachusetts.