2025 Faculty: A through F

Kemper Donovan

Kemper Donovan has lived in California almost his entire adult life. He attended Stanford University, where he double majored in English and economics. The econ was his attempt to learn something “useful,” but the joke was on him because his English honors thesis about mystery/suspense author Wilkie Collins turned out to be much more relevant to his future career. It took him many years to get there, however. First, he went to Harvard Law School, where he experienced one of Boston’s coldest winters on record. Is it any wonder he returned to California three years later, doubling down on the weather by moving to Los Angeles? (Much to the chagrin of his parents, he ended up using his law degree as much as his econ major. Technically, he is a retired lawyer, which means that after passing the bar he immediately switched to “retired” status to avoid registration fees and continuing education requirements.)

Out in L.A., Kemper worked for twelve years at a company called Circle of Confusion—no, really—representing screenwriters and comic books. His very first client wrote the feature film Hanna, released by Focus Features. (If you haven’t seen it, do; you won’t be sorry.) He began writing his first novel, The Decent Proposal, when he was still a manager. The story follows a man and woman, complete strangers who are approached by a lawyer representing a mysterious benefactor offering to pay them a significant amount of money to date each other for a year. They have no idea why, but eventually they agree to this outlandish proposition, and the story unspools from there…. Kemper didn’t realize it at the time, but what he was actually trying to write was a mystery.

By the time The Decent Proposal was published in 2016, Kemper was writing full time, and had begun a side project with his dear friend, Catherine Brobeck, who was one of the few people he knew whose lifelong obsession with Agatha Christie ran as deep as his. Together, they created the podcast All About Agatha, devoted to the one and only Queen of Crime, Dame Agatha Christie. Tragically, Catherine passed away at the end of 2021. Since then, Kemper has continued the podcast solo. It was his work on All About Agatha that inspired him to write a mystery series of his own, which is currently being published by Kensington Books. Despite their contemporary setting, tone, and preoccupations, the Ghostwriter Mysteries are very much written in homage to Christie and other writers of the golden age of detective fiction.

Kemper is married to a television writer. He and his husband have two young daughters. When he’s not with his family, or podcasting, or writing, he enjoys activities with a more tangible payoff, such as running and attempting to play the violin (alas, the emphasis is very much on the attempt). You can visit Kemper at www.KemperDonovan.com.