Writer, Creator & Cultural Strategist
Rozella Kennedy is a writer, creator, and cultural strategist who uses story, history, and equity as tools for individual and collective transformation. Born and raised in New York City and educated at the Brearley School, Tufts University, and the Université de Paris–Sorbonne, where she took an MA in French literature, she has lived in Paris, the UK, Santa Fe, the Bay Area, and the Pacific Northwest. She is fluent in French, strong in Spanish, and conversational in Italian and Portuguese—a range that shapes both what she reads and whose lives she is able to research in the original.
Her first book, Our Brave Foremothers: Celebrating 100 Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous Women Who Changed the Course of History (Workman/Hachette, 2023), profiles a hundred women across history with a hundred original illustrations by Joelle Avelino and a reflective prompt after each entry. It won a Nautilus Award, is available in print and audio, and has reached readers on six continents, where it is used by foundations, nonprofits, and justice-focused groups as well as read at home. She lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, a town known for its longstanding embrace and nurturing of creativity and beauty. She is involved with the San Miguel Writers’ Conference & Literary Festival, and she also engages in speaking, teaching, media and other engagements, both in Mexico and in the United States.
She has been a wordsmith and storyteller all her life. Her first book was a pop-up in a super-limited edition—as in, one—called Peas in a Pod, a nine-year-old’s argument that harmony and changing the world beat fame and fortune. From there to editing the school paper at Brearley, and on to writing and editing for Paris Passion, Sports Illustrated, Mothering, and Oxygen.com, the constant has been editorial rigor and a genuine affection for language.
Understanding her readers is central to how Rozella works. She publishes SistoryLessons, a biweekly newsletter celebrating little-known BIPOC women in history, and a weekly “mini-coaching” solidarity and unity series at rozellakennedy.substack.com. Both are written for an erudite readership that expects primary research rather than summary, and she has produced four editions of the Brave Sis journal and day planner for the same audience. She keeps a live, publicly viewable roster of the hundred women in her next book and researches it continuously against archives and current scholarship, so the work stays accountable to the record rather than to a deadline. Thirty years in philanthropy, the arts, and global impact—as an executive director, a development director, a director of impact and equity for an international advisory firm, and a consultant to Fortune 100 companies and foundations—taught her who reads this kind of history and what they do with it afterward.
Her next book is World Brave Sis: 100 Dream-Time Dialogues with Women Who Led the Way, in progress as three to four typographically distinctive volumes. A companion to Our Brave Foremothers, it takes the form of intimate first-person imagined interviews with a hundred women around the world, built from cultural history, narrative reimagining, and what she calls dream-time or psychic channeling, and it is written to reach the interior lives that the archival record leaves out. Alongside the drafting she runs her own newsletter, marketing, and speaking calendar, and through Brave Sis Project, which she founded in 2019, she carries the research into organizations.
She nourishes herself through African- and Brazilian-inspired dance, books, and beauty-making, and through life with her husband, the composer and conductor John Kennedy, and their Caribbean Potcake dog Pippa. Her two adult daughters live in Brooklyn.