Bio

Kevin Shay grew up in the suburbs of Boston. He attended a small private elementary school in Cambridge, where he performed as Sugreeva, the Monkey King, in a production of The Ramayana. At the same school, an alleged science teacher instructed him to examine, under a microscope, the “muscle striations” in a slice of bologna. Recovering from this academic setback, he later earned a degree in psychology from Brown University, where he also scripted two musicals.

After early stints using BASIC and Logo, Kevin began playing with computers in earnest at age 12. In the course of his career in the software industry, he has worked with the creator of the Parker Brothers “Merlin” toy, fixed Y2K bugs for Philip Morris, tested the first Macintosh Java compiler, produced those sheets of stamps Columbia House sends out to offer you 12 CDs for a penny, spearheaded some important innovations in the field of online baby naming, written a Movable Type plugin named after Red Sox slugger David Ortiz, and enabled users of adult toys to blog about their use of adult toys.

Meanwhile, Kevin served as the website editor of McSweeney’s in 2000 and 2001. He co-edited Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans, an anthology of humor from the McSweeney’s site. His short humor pieces have appeared in print and online in McSweeney’s, eCompany Now, Salon, Modern Humorist, and the anthology 101 Damnations. Two of his one-act plays were performed in San Francisco in 2003 and 2004 as part of the Bruno’s Island New Plays Festival. The End as I Know It is his first novel.

He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife Gabria and their Welsh Corgi, Lola.

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