Kevin Kling is a well-known playwright and storyteller living in Minneapolis. Best known for his popular commentaries on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and his storytelling stage shows like Tales from the Charred Underbelly of the Yule Log, Kling delivers hilarious, often tender stories. Kling’s autobiographical tales are as enchanting as they are true to life: hopping freight trains, getting hit by lightning, performing his banned play in Czechoslovakia, growing up in Minnesota, and eating things before knowing what they are. He has been awarded numerous arts grants and fellowships. The National Endowment for the Arts, The McKnight Foundation, The Minnesota State Arts Board, The Bush Foundation, The Jerome Foundation and others have recognized Kling’s artistry. Kevin Kling continues to write plays and stories in a rigorous fashion. He travels around the globe to numerous storytelling festivals and residencies, and has been invited to perform in the acclaimed National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee for several years. Kevin has released a number of compact disc collections of his stories, and he has published several books including The Dog Says How (2007), Holiday Inn (2009), and the children's books Big Little Brother (2011) and Big Little Mother (2013).
"Kling has an enviable gift for storytelling, a sense of humor rooted equally in pain and whimsy . . . and an uncanny ability to transform intensely personal memories, especially those of family life, into something instantly recognizable and, at the same time, strangely exalted." —Chicago Sun-Times
"Come & Get It [is] an aching, haunting and humorous meditation on love, death, disability and art . . . Kling has never lost his ability to blindside his audiences with the snappy, telling one-liner, and those are present in abundance here . . . But the wistfulness that has always infused Kling's work has taken on a poetic and more profound ring, as when he compares motorcycling to the darting birds ‘living life just ahead of their bodies’ or when he casually tosses off the idea that our lives are stories, not syllogisms.” —Pioneer Press (St. Paul, MN)
“[A] gripping autobiographical monologue . . . Mr. Kling’s lean, terse storytelling style has a faintly folksy ring . . . Home and Away ultimately rejoices in the strange interconnectedness of bizarre phenomena.” —Stephen Holden, The New York Times
Selected Works
