Kenneth McCluskey

Kenneth McCluskey was born in Brooklyn, New York, and has spent his life moving between places and languages — from Long Island to Fairfield, Connecticut, to Kenitra, Morocco, and eventually settling in Russia, New York with his wife, Donyce.

For forty years, he taught English, French, and Latin in North Africa and Central New York State. His classroom was a place where language was understood not merely as grammar and vocabulary, but as a window into how people live, remember, and tell stories about themselves.

That sensibility carries directly into his fiction. The Tales of New Serbia are set in a small, fictional Adirondack township — a place where everyone knows everyone, the farms are dying, and the past has a stubborn way of refusing to stay buried. His characters are ordinary people: a constable, a reclusive spinster, a grieving widower, a headstrong nonagenarian. What happens to them is rarely spectacular, but always true.

He and Donyce are the parents of two grown children and grandparents of two grandchildren.