About the Book
Kennedy/Gioia's An Introduction to Poetry, 13th edition continues to inspire students with a rich collection of poems and engaging insights on reading, analyzing, and writing about poetry. The authors of this bestselling book are the recipients of many prestigious poetry awards. Features new to this edition include:
Exclusive conversation between Dana Gioia and U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan, offer students an insider's look into the importance of literature and reading in the life of this poet. More than 50 new selections--from a wonderful range of poets including Kevin Young, Bettie Sellers, Mary Oliver, David Lehman, Constantine Cavafy, Rainer Maria Rilke, Anne Stevenson, James Weldon Johnson, Alice Fulton, Jimmy Baca, Rita Dove, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lorine Niedecker, among others. New 2009 MLA guidelines--provides students the updated source citation guidelines from the new 7th edition of the MLA Handbook and incorporates these in all sample student papers. About the Author:
X. J. Kennedy, after graduation from Seton Hall and Columbia, became a journalist second class in the Navy ("Actually, I was pretty eighth class"). His poems, some published in the
New Yorker, were first collected in
Nude Descending a Staircase (1961). Since then he has written six more collections, several widely adopted literature and writing textbooks, and seventeen books for children, including two novels. He has taught at Michigan, North Carolina (Greensboro), California (Irvine), Wellesley, Tufts, and Leeds. Cited in
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and reprinted in some 200 anthologies, his verse has brought him a Guggenheim fellowship, a Lamont Award, a
Los Angeles Times Book Prize, an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, an Aiken-Taylor prize, the Robert Frost Medal of the Poetry Society of America, and the Award for Poetry for Children from the National Council of Teachers of English. He now lives in Lexington, Massachusetts, where he and his wife Dorothy have collaborated on four books and five children.
Dana Gioia is a poet, critic, and teacher. Born in Los Angeles of Italian and Mexican ancestry, he attended Stanford and Harvard before taking a detour into business. ("Not many poets have a Stanford M.B.A., thank goodness!") After years of writing and reading late in the evenings after work, he quit a vice presidency to write and teach. He has published three collections of poetry, Daily Horoscope (1986), The Gods of Winter (1991), and Interrogations at Noon (2001), which won the American Book Award; an opera libretto, Nosferatu (2001); and three critical volumes, including Can Poetry Matter? (1992), an influential study of poetry's place in contemporary America. Gioia has taught at Johns Hopkins, Sarah Lawrence, Wesleyan (Connecticut), Mercer, and Colorado College. He is also the co-founder of the summer poetry conference at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. From 2003-2009 he served as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. At the NEA he created the largest literary programs in federal history, including Shakespeare in American Communities and Poetry Out Loud, the national high school poetry recitation contest. He also led the campaign to restore active and engaged literary reading by creating The Big Read, which has helped reverse a quarter century of decline in U.S. reading. He currently divides his time between Washington, D.C. and Santa Rosa, California, living with his wife Mary, their two sons, and two uncontrollable cats.
