Kathy Kelly

Kathy Kelly
Speaking at Lasallian Youth, 2008
Born	Kathy Kelly December 10, 1952 Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Education	Loyola University Chicago
Occupation	Peace activist
Years active	1978–present

Kathy Kelly (born 1952) is an American peace activist, pacifist and author, one of the founding members of Voices in the Wilderness, and currently a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence. As part of peace team work in several countries, she has traveled to Iraq twenty-six times, notably remaining in combat zones during the early days of both US-Iraq wars. Her recent travel has focused on Afghanistan and Gaza, along with domestic protests against U.S. drone policy. She has been arrested more than sixty times at home and abroad, and written of her experiences among targets of U.S. military bombardment and inmates of U.S. prisons. She lives in Chicago.

Kelly was born in 1952 in Chicago's Garfield Ridge neighborhood to parents Frank and Catherine Kelly. She attended St. Paul-Kennedy "shared-time" high school, which split her days between a Catholic institution where she was given the writings of Daniel Berrigan and Martin Luther King Jr. to read alongside biblical texts, and a desegregating public school where interracial violence was common. She obtained her BA from Loyola University Chicago working a succession of night jobs to help cover tuition, including a stint on a meat-packing factory line which inspired her to become a lifelong vegetarian. During these years she remembers being deeply moved by Alain Resnais' Holocaust documentary Night and Fog, by a lecture by Vietnam War activist Tom Cornell, and by the activist scripture writings of William Stringfellow.

After college in 1978, and while working on her MA in Religious Education (at Chicago Theological Seminary,) Kelly began volunteer work in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood (where she still resides), working at a local soup kitchen with a circle of activists, including future SOAW founder Roy Bourgeois, centered around Chicago's Francis of Assisi House, a homeless shelter in the Catholic Worker tradition. In 1980 she began work as a teacher of religion at St. Ignatius College Preparatory School.