Pagan Kennedy is an author and pioneer of the 1990s zine movement, along with writer/publishers like Lisa Crystal Carver of Rollerderby, Jim Goad of ANSWER Me! and Larry Crane of Tape Op. Her autobiographical zine Pagan's Head detailed her life in extraordinary detail. She also writes for many magazines and newspapers including Boston Magazine, the Boston Globe and the New York Times.
Born Pamela Kennedy, she graduated from Wesleyan University in 1984, and later spent a year in the Masters of Fine Arts program at Johns Hopkins University. A native of suburban Washington DC, Kennedy currently lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, with her partner, Kevin Bruyneel. She previously lived with filmmaker Liz Canner in a set-up she has described as similar to a Boston marriage. She is currently a visiting professor of creating writing at Dartmouth College.
She wrote a biography, The First Man-Made Man, about Michael Dillon who, in the 1940s, survived the world's first female-to-male sex change treatment and established himself as a medical student. It describes how he later fell in love with a male-to-female transsexual, Roberta Cowell, who was at the time the only other transsexual in Britain.