X. J. Kennedy is a former English professor, now a freelance writer in Lexington, MA. His first poem appeared in The New Yorker in 1956; ever since, he has slogged on, and will have a new collection, The Lords of Misrule: Poems 1992-2001 from John Hopkins University Press. He has also written children's books: new this spring are Elefantina's Dream (Penguin Putnam) and a selected nonsense poems, Exploding Gravy (Little, Brown). He has also written and edited textbooks, among them An Introduction to Poetry, 10th edition (Longman, 2002; co-authored with Dana Gioia).