In 2003 Kennedy published his first *book, Loser Goes First: My Thirty-Something Years of Dumb Luck and Minor Humiliation, with Random House. A memoir followed in 2008 entitled Rock On: An Office Power Ballad, which the New York Times described as "...a succession of gently mordant vignettes, with hilariously spot-on asides about media image-making". He discussed the book, and his time working for Atlantic Records in New York, with Terry Gross on NPR's "Fresh Air". Kennedy's debut novel American Spirit was released in 2013, receiving the coveted starred review from Publishers Weekly, which heralded the book as having, "...far surpassed the creation of character and conjured an entity so alive in its knowledge of impending death that we're captured in a new idea of what it's like to live." Kennedy's writing has appeared in GQ Magazine and on the Peabody Award winning Moth Radio Hour, and has been published in multiple literary anthologies in Europe and the United States.
