Artist

XJ Kennedy’s poems have appeared in more than one hundred fifty textbooks and anthologies and have aired on the Today show, Good Morning America and Garrison Keillor's radio programs. He has published sixteen children's books and the anthologies Knock at a Star and Talking Like the Rain alongside his wife Dorothy M. Kennedy. He has taught English at the University of Michigan, the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina and from 1963 through 1978 at Tufts, with visiting sojourns at Wellesley, University of California Irvine, and the University of Leeds. In 1978, he became a free-lance writer. Kennedy’s work includes Nude Descending a Staircase, 1961 (Lamont Award of the Academy of American Poets) and Cross Ties: Selected Poems, 1985 (Los Angeles Book Award for poetry). Kennedy also received the first Michael Braude Award for light verse given by the American Academy & Institute of Arts & Letters, Guggenheim and National Arts Council fellowships, The National Council of Teachers of English Award for Excellence in Children's Poetry in 2000 and in 2004 the Poets' Prize for The Lords of Misrule: Poems 1992-2002.