Mark Kennedy is the author of two previous books with Holistic Education Press, and a dozen essays for Paths of Learning, Reaching Today’s Youth, and the peer reviewed, The Journal of At-Risk Issues in the 1990s and 2000s before standardized testing and teaching took holistic education out of play and effectively shut down all its presses. That caused him to stop writing for two decades.

Retiring in 2020 after 30 years of teaching adjudicated teens, Kennedy began writing again in 2024 after receiving a diagnosis for a hidden disability—autism and ADHD—at the tender age of 72. Suddenly he felt a new freedom as his hidden life-long foe was made plain through the diagnosis.

In part to cope with the unseen adversary, long before a diagnosis and simultaneously with his teaching career, Kennedy cross-trained in Hapkido, Shaolin Kempo, American Kenpo, and Kung Fu San Soo, and taught martial arts to his high-risk teens, retiring as an 8th degree black belt instructor.

Now 25 years sober and retired from teaching and martial arts, Kennedy enjoys learning in all forms, reading, writing, Zumba, fellowship with like-minded friends, and time with his White Shepherd fur boss, Kona.