Author Bio
X.J. Kennedy's poems have appeared in more than one hundred fifty textbooks and anthologies and have been aired on the Today show, Good Morning America, and Garrison Keillor's radio programs. In recognition of his work for adults, Mr. Kennedy was the first recipient of an international prize for light verse awarded by the Academy of American Arts and Letters, and he is the 2000 winner of the Award for Excellence in Children's Poetry given by the National Council of Teachers of English. He has published sixteen children's books and, with his wife, Dorothy M. Kennedy, anthologies Knock at a Star and Talking Like the Rain. Formerly a professor of English at Tufts University, X.J. Kennedy lives with his wife in Lexington, Massachusetts next door to a busy bike path, in a hundred-year-old house with a colony of rabbits under the front porch. They have five large children and two small grandchildren.
X. J. and Dorothy M. Kennedy were born (respectively) in Dover, N.J. and Milwaukee. They met as graduate students at the University of Michigan, and have since produced five children, two best-selling college English textbooks, and two anthologies of poetry for children, Knock at a Star and Talking Like the Rain. On her own, Dorothy has compiled two other anthologies of verse for kids, and X. J. (known to his friends as Joe) two novels for ages 8-12, several books of verse for children and several for adults. He is a good enough poet to be quoted twice in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.