"Starting in the early 1960s, he turned out dozens of poetry and children's books, contributed to the popular Bedford Reader and collaborated with the poet and onetime National Endowment for the Arts chair Dana Gioia on anthologies of poetry, drama and fiction. I write for three separate audiences: children, college students (who use textbooks), and that small band of people who still read poetry, Kennedy once observed."
"The Bedford Reader, established in the early 1980s, is a widely used composition book for college students that has included everything from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech to the classic Shirley Jackson story The Lottery. Kennedy edited the Reader along with his wife, Dorothy; Jane E. Aaron and Ellen Kuhl Repetto."
X.J. Kennedy was born Joseph Charles Kennedy and adopted the professional name X.J. Kennedy to avoid confusion with Joseph P. Kennedy. He died of natural causes at 96 at his home in Peabody, Massachusetts; his daughter, Dr. Kate Kennedy, confirmed the death. Beginning in the early 1960s, he published dozens of poetry volumes and children's books and collaborated with Dana Gioia on anthologies of poetry, drama and fiction. He edited the Bedford Reader with his wife Dorothy, Jane E. Aaron and Ellen Kuhl Repetto. His poems appeared in The New Yorker and The Atlantic and were concise, rhymed vignettes that mixed light tone with dark, unsettling subjects.
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