Kostya Kennedy is an editorial director at Dotdash Meredith, overseeing special editions under LIFE, People, EatingWell, Real Simple, Health, Entertainment Weekly and other brands. The editions embrace a range of topics including pop culture, health and wellness, food, lifestyle, music, and pets. He is a former assistant managing editor and senior writer at Sports Illustrated. He has been a staff writer at Newsday and has written for The New York Times, Time, FiveThirtyEight.com, The Huffington Post and The New Yorker.
Along with 2022’s True: The Four Seasons of Jackie Robinson, Kennedy is the author of the award-winning 56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports, as well as Pete Rose: An American Dilemma. Both were New York Times bestsellers and each received the CASEY Award as Best Baseball Book of its respective year. Kennedy’s 2016 book Lasting Impact: One Team, One Season. What Happens When Our Sons Play Football followed a season of high school football.
Kennedy earned an M.S. from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, from which he received a Pulitzer Fellowship. He has taught in the graduate journalism program at Columbia and at NYU, in the journalism department, and at the Preston Robert Tisch Institute of Global Sport.
His television work includes regular appearances as a contributing analyst and commentator on the MLB Network, as well as appearances on Late Night with Seth Meyers, Morning Joe, and numerous other television and radio programs. Kennedy edited Sports Illustrated’s The Story of Baseball in 100 Photographs, Super Bowl Gold: 50 Years of the Big Game, The Hockey Book, and Swimsuit: 50 Years of Beautiful.
Kennedy grew up on Long Island, where he lived in a house, which he wrote about here. Before Columbia, he graduated with honors as a philosophy major from Stony Brook University where he competed in exactly one game of the school’s rogue bloodsport, pit hockey. Kennedy also played bass guitar as a founding member of the specialty band Rychyrd Prychyrd. He lives with his wife and children in New York.