Kimberly Meehan Books in Order

Kimberly Meehan grew up in Suffolk County on Long Island, in Miller Place, and later spent about seventeen years of adult life in Brooklyn. That movement between a quieter beach town and the noise of the city seems to matter in her work. Her fiction is rooted in New York streets, boardwalks, odd jobs, neighborhood loyalties, and the kind of people who are always one half-baked scheme away from trouble.

Her route into writing was not a straight line.

Meehan studied studio art at Hunter College, earning her B.A. in 2007, and that visual background still feels like part of her creative makeup. She has also described herself as a painter, and as a teenager she performed Irish step dance at Radio City Music Hall. Those details sound like they belong to different lives, but with Meehan they sit side by side, art, movement, and a taste for unusual work.

Science took up a big part of the next chapter. She worked as a science instructor at the New York Hall of Science, joined Brooklyn College's GK-12 City-as-Lab program, earned an M.A. in geology from Brooklyn College in 2011, and completed a Ph.D. in geology and paleoecology at the CUNY Graduate Center in 2014. Her doctoral work was done with ties to the American Museum of Natural History, and much of her research focused on fossils, ancient marine environments, and the slow evidence held in stone.

She taught, too.

Over the years Meehan taught at Hunter College, Pace University, and Brooklyn College, and later worked at the University at Buffalo. She also spent time in Western New York science education and museum spaces, including the Buffalo Museum of Science. For a long time, her public life seems to have run on two tracks at once, careful scientific work on one side, creative projects on the other.

Her fiction debut, The Coney Island Hot Dog Heist, arrived in 2016. It was followed quickly by Rockaway Run and Battle for the Canal, three novels that make up the Van Bakel Beach series. The books focus on Eddie Gillespie, Mickey O'Sullivan, and their circle, small-time Brooklyn strivers whose plans keep ballooning into messy capers. The setting is fictional, but it is clearly built from years of close observation. Meehan's first novel also placed third for fiction in the 2017 Next Generation Indie Book Awards.

What readers tend to like in these books is fairly easy to spot. Meehan writes Brooklyn as a lived-in place, not a postcard. Her characters are underemployed, impulsive, funny, and often a little sad around the edges. The jokes can be rough, the situations can get wild, but the hunger underneath them, for money, for love, for a better break, feels human. Nobody in these novels seems cleaned up for display.

That may be the real link between her science work and her fiction.

Both ask her to pay attention. One looks at old shells, rock layers, and traces of vanished worlds. The other looks at people hanging around a Brooklyn beach, talking themselves into a bigger life. In more recent years, Meehan has lived in Western New York and turned some of that same hands-on energy toward art and small-batch products through a shop in Cuba, New York. However you come to her, through fossils or fiction, her path has never been only one thing.