XJ Kennedy, prize-winning poet and educator, dead at 96
XJ Kennedy, an award-winning poet, author, translator and educator who schooled millions of students through “The Bedford Reader” and other textbooks and engaged voluntary readers with his children’s stories and intricate, witty verse, has died at age 96. Kennedy died Sunday of natural causes at his home in Peabody, Massachusetts, according to his daughter, Dr. Kate Kennedy.
Born Joseph Charles Kennedy, he chose the professional name XJ Kennedy as a young man to avoid confusion with Joseph P. Kennedy, the former ambassador to Britain and father of President John F. Kennedy. 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 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.
