D.K. Kennedy studied writing and literary criticism at the Women Writers Center in Cazenovia, New York, in the mid-seventies with second-wave feminists Audre Lorde, Marge Piercy, Rita Mae Brown, Adrienne Rich, and Kate Millet. She was a tax mapper in New York, reading colonial-era wills and deeds. In Massachusetts, she worked nights for an answering service that doubled as the local police dispatch line. While in graduate school, she ran a safe house for abused women and children and taught writing to deaf students and court-involved teens. Throughout these adventures, she was, more or less, a single parent. When not writing, D. K. lives with her husband and three English setters in northern New Hampshire.