About Kevin
GENERAL
Kevin Kuzma is a freelance journalist, trade magazine editor and public relations professional. His feature writing, essays and short stories have appeared in The Kansas City Star, Urban Times, Review, Ink Magazine, Present Magazine and Fatherville.com, an online forum for fathers. Since 2005, he has served as Communications Manager for PlattForm Advertising, a Kansas City-based agency that provides services to the higher education realm. In 2009, he was named a member of the Park University Student Publication Advisory Board.
PERSONAL
Born mere hours after April Fool’s Day, Kevin Kuzma is a Kansas City, Kansas native, who was raised in the strange mixture of urban blight and country landscapes. His father, Eugene, worked at a meat packing plant in nearby Kansas City, Mo.’s “West Bottoms” industrial district, a name referring to the area’s location on the Missouri River lowlands and also a comment on the workers’ downtrodden spirit brought on by the laborious and often degrading manual labor. His mother, Lois, was an adminstrative assistant at a small insurance office and after his parents divorced in 1985, Lois raised Kevin and older brother, Mick, on her own. Gradually, throughout his childhood, the neighborhood in which Kevin lived would become increasingly dangerous, and the city would develop a reputation for corrupted government, high crime and murder rates, and urban sprawl. These deteriorating conditions were critical to the development and the importance of scenery and detail in his writing.
Kevin spent his formative years playing alone in his maternal grandparent’s castle-like house located about a mile from his childhood home. He cultivated his imagination while hiding behind furniture and exploring the expansive backyard acreage of vegetable and flower gardens and trees. At an early age, he began illustrating and writing stories and later rediscovered his abilities as a writer when a classroom assignment – a newspaper article – he wrote was complimented by a high school journalism instructor. After brief stints at the University of Kansas in the fall of 1994 and a local community college, he studied at Park College (now Park University) where he was editor of the campus newspaper, The Stylus. He graduated in 1998 and was selected by a faculty committee for the Parkite Award, the institution’s highest honor given to one male and female student annually for achievements in academia and campus activities.
The following year, freelance writing work led to his hiring as a reporter at Sun Publications, the largest chain of weekly newspapers in the Kansas City metropolitan area. During his first days at the newspaper, he met his eventual wife and decided to leave the journalism field for better-paying work that would allow him to continue writing. He’s since written in a variety of roles involving corporate communications, public relations, and advertising and marketing. Kevin’s work has appeared in every medium possible, except broadcast television. By 2003, he’d begun keeping a journal and writing short fiction pieces.
In 2006, he returned to the journalism field as a trade magazine editor and then rejoined the traditional media as a freelance journalist for Urban Times in 2007. His marriage produced three children – Annie (6), Charlie (5) and Caroline (3) – who have supplanted what was once the primary passion in his life and are a popular muse for his personal writings.
INDUSTRY-SPECIFIC
Kevin Kuzma is Editor of Career College Central. He is a former newspaper editor and public relations spokesperson. His feature writing, essays and short stories have appeared in The Kansas City Star, Urban Times, Review, Ink Magazine, Present Magazine and Fatherville.com, an online forum for fathers. Since 2005, he has served as Manager of Public Relations and Publications for PlattForm. The Kansas City-based company is a full-service Marketing, Advertising and Public Relations firm specializing in creative solutions for higher education and all branches of the U.S. military.
