Kieran Mundy

Artist Statement

I tell stories that examine humanity’s fraught relationship to chronic illness through the lens of food, wellness culture, and climate change. My work is an exploration of what it looks like to inhabit a sick body in a world obsessed with the commodification of health, plunging readers into the dark, murky spaces that separate sickness from health and satirizing The Wellness Industrial Complex while simultaneously giving voice to the very real reasons someone who is sick might inadvertently move towards frameworks constructed to keep them that way. By framing capitalism, climate change, and illness as an interrelated, complex web spinning out of our collective past and into our inherited future, I aim to make readers ask if our unremitting quest for vitality is what actually may kill us.

Kieran Mundy_"The Getaway"_short fiction_written in 2022_published in "Passages North" Spring of 2025.

Bio

Kieran's short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Passages North, Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, The Massachusetts Review, Joyland, and elsewhere and has been recognized in Wigleaf's Top 50 Very Short Fictions of 2017 and 2019. She is a 2022 Best of the Net nominee and the recipient of Gulf Coast's 2020 Barthelme Prize for Short Prose, judged by Jenny Offill. Kieran holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Oregon and has received funding and support for her work from Tin House, Ragdale, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center and Craigardan. She is a 2024 Oregon Literary Arts Fellow, and is currently at work on a novel-in-stories entitled "Carnivores."

kieranmundy.com