Walt Whitman Birthplace Association
POETS-IN-RESIDENCE

We are most proud of our sponsorship of a Poet-in-Residence Program, which each year, has honored, distinguished contemporary poets.

William Heyen-1981, Allan Planz-1982, Louis Simpson-1983, John Ciardi-1984, W.D.Snodgrass-1985, Galway Kinnell-1986, David Ignatow-1987, June Jordan-1988, Stanley Kunitz-1989, William Stafford-1990, Allen Ginsberg-1991, Sharon Olds-1992, Adrienne Rich-1993, Robert Bly-1994, Joseph Bruchac-1995, Diane Wakoski-1996, Galway Kinnell-1997 Mark Rudman-1998, Yevgeny Yevtushenko-1999, Marge Piercy-2000, Billy Collins-2001, Gary Soto-2002, Samuel Menashe-2003, Marvin Bell-2004, Nikki Giovanni-2005, Molly Peacock-2006, David Wagoner-2007, Alicia Ostriker-2008, X. J. Kennedy-2009

X. J. Kennedy
Poet In Residence 2009

X. J. Kennedy was born in 1929 in Dover, N.J., and now lives in Lexington, Mass. To avoid confusion with better-known Joe Kennedys, he stuck an X on his name when first sending out poems, and ever since has been stuck with it. A Navy veteran, he is a graduate of Seton Hall, Columbia, and the U. of Paris. Before turning free-lance writer in 1978, he taught at the universities of Michigan, North Carolina (Greensboro), California (Irvine), and Leeds, and at Tufts and Wellesley. He is a former poetry editor of The Paris Review; his poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Hudson Review, and elsewhere, and have been heard on the BBC, Good Morning America, and Garrison Keillor’s radio programs. For children, he has written ten books of verse and two fantasy novels; and for high school and college students, textbooks including An Introduction to Poetry, co-authored with Dana Gioia, now in a twelfth edition. Knock at a Star: A Child’s Introduction to Poetry, by him and his wife Dorothy, has been a best-seller since 1982. Kennedy’s new-and-selected poems, In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus (Johns Hopkins U. Press) was a 2008 ALA Notable Book. This April his life’s work in verse receives the Robert Frost Medal of the Poetry Society of America.