Throughout his long and illustrious career, poet and author X. J. Kennedy has cut a wide literary swath. He has informed tens of thousands of college students about poetry and literature in his many editions of An Introduction to Poetry (1997, in its 9th edition), Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama (1998), and his Bedford Reader (1999), all academic texts.His adult poetry, which includes Nude Descending a Staircase: Poems, Songs, Ballad (1995) and Dark Horses: New Poems (1992), has won many national awards including a Guggenheim fellowship. His anthologies of poetry for children and his own volumes of original poems range from realistic to nonsensical and are tempered in between by his hilarious Brats series that portrays mischievous children in many a domestic squabble. It is for the latter, his great contribution to children’s poetry, that the NCTE Selection Committee has honored him with the prestigious National Council of Teachers of English Award for Poetry for Children.