Kenny Carroll

About the Artist

For the past 20 years Kenny Carroll, a native Washingtonian, has used his love of literature and community to serve his fellow D.C. citizens. A former Duke Ellington High School for the Arts literary and media instructor and past president of the African American Writers Guild, Carroll was a founding member of the African American Cultural Arts Center and the 8Rock Writers Collective. He is the founding executive director of the D.C. Writers Corps and teaches writing at Montgomery County Community College and the Writers’ Center.

In 1991, he received the Mayor's Award for Service to Disabled Constituency as part of the Spoken Word Ensemble. He received the 1999 Mayor's Arts Award for Service to the Arts and the Washington Independent Writers President's Award. In 2004 he was selected as WETA's Hometown Hero for his service to youth. He was a featured writer in the Smithsonian Institute's exhibit on black writers entitled "Tellin' Stories." He performs and lectures frequently at colleges and other venues. An accomplished writer, his poetry and plays have appeared in numerous local and national journals and magazines, including Black Literature Forum, In Search Of Color Everywhere, Catch a Fire, Spirit & Flame, Beyond The Frontier, Washington Post, and One Magazine. He was also a 2005 Pushcart Prize nominee in poetry and was awarded a 2006 Literary Fellowship from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. He is married and the proud father of a daughter and two sons.