A. Kendra Greene Announces The Museum of Whales You Will Never See

KHN Alum (2013), writer and letterpress printer, A. Kendra Greene, has announced her debut collection of essays and drawings, which will be published by Penguin Random House on May 12, 2020. The Museum of Whales You Will Never See: And Other Excursions to Iceland's Most Unusual Museums will be available online and at major booksellers. The audiobook will also be releaed, which is read by the author.

About her debut, via Penguin Random House: "Mythic creatures, natural wonders, and the mysterious human impulse to collect are on beguiling display in this poetic tribute to the museums of an otherworldly island nation." Newsweek says "Glittering with whimsy and speckled with small drawings, The Museum of Whales You Will Never See provides a much-needed detour to a place most of us won't ever get to see." 

"Iceland is home to only 330,000 people (roughly the population of Lexington, Kentucky) but more than 265 museums and public collections--nearly one for every ten people. They range from the intensely physical, like the Icelandic Phallological Museum, which collects the penises of every mammal known to exist in Iceland, to the vaporously metaphysical, like the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft, which poses a particularly Icelandic problem: How to display what can't be seen? In The Museum of Whales You Will Never See, A. Kendra Greene is our wise and whimsical guide through this cabinet of curiosities, showing us, in dreamlike anecdotes and more than thirty charming illustrations, how a seemingly random assortment of objects--a stuffed whooper swan, a rubber boot, a shard of obsidian, a chastity belt for rams--can map a people's past and future, their fears and obsessions. 'The world is chockablock with untold wonders,' she writes, 'there for the taking, ready to be uncovered at any moment, if only we keep our eyes open.'" (via Goodreads)

A. Kendra Greene began her museum career adhering text to the wall: one vinyl letter at a time. The University of Iowa gave her an MFA in Nonfiction and the opportunity to costume a giant ground sloth in its Museum of Natural History. She's been a Fulbright Grantee, Jacob K. Javits Fellow, and most recently Visiting Artist at the Dallas Museum of Art's Center for Creative Connections. Her zines appear in the White Rock Zine Machine "for 25 cents a pop." Amongst her other works including essays, art, and sound projects, A. Kendra Greene has published the books Anatomy of a Museum, The Stone Collector, and Vagrants and Uncommon Visitors.

A. Kendra Greene is a writer and artist who has worked at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Chicago History Museum, the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History, and the Dallas Museum of Art, where she was a writer in residence. She has an MFA in nonfiction and a graduate certificate in book arts from the University of Iowa and has been the recipient of a Fulbright grant, a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, and a Harvard Library Innovation Lab Fellowship. She lives in Dallas, Texas, where she is a visiting assistant professor at the University of Texas, a guest artist at Nasher Sculpture Center, and an associate editor at Southwest Review. (via Penguin Random House)

Congratulations, Kendra!