Kevin Wensley

Kevin has spent most of his life in, on, and around sailboats—sailing, fixing, racing, breaking, selling, coaching on them, and, on rare and adventurous occasions, even sinking them. His journey took a decisive turn in 1998 when marriage and a technology start-up, led by his good friend Laurence Holt (creator of Stikky Books), brought him to Manhattan. While his wife Clare became the first U.S.-based partner for a UK software company, Kevin immersed himself in the sailing world—joining the leadership team of the BT Global Challenge, “the world’s toughest yacht race,” in San Francisco, and later moving to Florida to ultimately serve as operations director for the largest commercial sailing school in the United States.

His connection to Stikky Books came naturally. As the editor of SAIL Magazine put it, the series can make you “never look at a night sky the same way again”—a sentiment Kevin enthusiastically echoes. Stikky really does change the way we experience the world. After a brief early-2000s pilot launch of Stikky in a pre-social media, pre-self-publishing era, the project went quiet. Two decades later, with the publishing landscape transformed and Laurence armed with a master’s in neuroscience from Columbia, the revitalized Stikky series is ready for a new audience.