About Ken Arnold
Ken Arnold started out to be a poet when he graduated from The Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars in 1967. During the 1970s, he wrote and published poetry in little magazines, and founded his own poetry journal, "Portfolio." He was also the Social Sciences Editor for The Johns Hopkins University Press for six years before moving to Temple University Press as Editor in Chief in 1974. He began writing for the theater; his first play, House of Bedlam, about the poet Ezra Pound, was produced by the New Playwrights Theater of Washington, DC, in 1978. Invited to be a Eugene O'Neill Fellow at the National Playwrights Conference in 1979, he developed his play, She Also Dances, which was premiered by South Coast Repertory Company in Costa Mesa, California, in 1983. The play was cited in Best Plays of 1983 (in American regional theaters).
Appointed Director of Rutgers University Press in 1982, Ken focused on his publishing career (and raising two children, Nick and Ruth) for the next fifteen years. He left Rutgers in 1994, after expanding the program and growing annual revenues from $300,000 to $3,000,000, to form the PubComm Group. The new company worked with nonprofits to develop strategies for web-based information systems. Ken left the company in 1998 to become editor of CrossCurrents, an influential interreligious journal founded in 1959.
Ordained a deacon in the Episcopal Church in 1998, Ken worked was affiliated with St. Mary's Episcopal Church, Manhattanville, and then with St. Clement's Episcopal Church, on the West Side of Manhattan. He married Connie Kirk in 2001 and both moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where Ken became Director of Communications for the Diocese of Massachusetts. Two years later, he and Connie returned to New York City when Ken was invited to become the Publisher for Church Publishing, Inc., an official publisher of the Episcopal Church. While with Church Publishing, he acquired the Morehouse Publishing imprint and the Living the Good News curriculum program from Continuum, expanding the Church Publishing program by over three-hundred percent in annual revenues.
In 1999, Ken returned to writing for the theater with Enlightenment, a play about the monk Thomas Merton, which received a staged reading at St. Clement's Theater in New York City in 2000.
Following surgery and treatment for prostate cancer, Ken decided to retire as clergy in 2007 and step down as Publisher for the Episcopal Church. He and Connie moved to Portland, Oregon, where he began writing stories, resumed writing poems, and returned to writing for the theater. He also began work on a new non-fiction book, The Christian Atheist: Trusting the Wisdom Within.
Ken is the author of two previous books in spirituality: On the Way: Vocation, Awareness, and Flyfishing (Church Publishing Inc.), and Night Fishing In Galilee: The Journey Toward Spiritual Wisdom (Cowley Publications/Rowman & Littlefield).
He and Connie decided to found KenArnoldBooks, LLC, after they moved to Portland in the summer of 2007.
