About me
Kennedy is most recognized for his light verse, and was the first recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Michael Braude Award for Light Verse. His first book, Nude Descending a Staircase, won the 1961 Lamont Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets, and his dozens of books have won awards including Guggenheim and National Arts Council fellowships, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry magazine, and a Los Angeles Times Book Award for poetry (in 1985 for Cross Ties: Selected Poems), the 1969/70 Shelley Memorial Award, the Golden Rose of the New England Poetry Club, honorary degrees from Lawrence and Adelphi Universities and Westfield State College. Kennedy received the National Council of Teachers of English Year 2000 Award for Excellence in Children's Poetry. He received the 2004 Poets' Prize for his work, The Lords of Misrule: Poems 1992-2002. Kennedy accepted the Poetry Society of America’s Robert Frost Medal for lifetime service to poetry in 2009. In 2015, he received the Jackson Poetry Prize, awarded by Poets & Writers.[3]
X.J. Kennedy was born in Dover, New Jersey in 1929. He is the author of sixteen poetry collections, including Nude Descending a Staircase (1961), Cross Ties: Selected Poems (1985), and In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems (2007). He has also written seven textbooks, not including additional editions, and nineteen children’s books. In addition, Kennedy has collaborated, as editors, with his wife Dorothy. His honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bess Hokin Prize, the Lamont Award, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the Robert Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America. He served four years in the U.S. Navy’s Atlantic Fleet as a journalist and photographer. He was a former poetry editor for The Paris Review and in the early 1970s, he published the magazine Counter/Measures. Kennedy taught at the University of Michigan, Tufts University, Wellesley College, the University of California at Irvine, and at the University of Leeds. X.J. Kennedy currently lives in Lexington, Massachusetts.
"Kennedy's work remains cultured, likable, and witty."—Publishers Weekly
"X. J. Kennedy belongs to that class of uncompromising formalists that includes Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, Donald Justice and W. D. Snodgrass ... Widely regarded, and occasionally disregarded, as a practitioner of light verse ... he serves his light with a healthy dose of darkness; his best work is a tug of war between levity and gravity."—Eric McHenry, New York Times Book Review
"Very little human experience is beyond the range of his keen eye and his well turned lines. We are fortunate to have him working among us."—Jan Schreiber
"These are beautiful poems [Dark Horses] by one of the best poets we have."—Richard Moore, Sewanee Review
