Dorothy Mintzlaff Kennedy was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A graduate of Milwaukee-Downer College (now merged with Lawrence University), she received her M.A. from the University of Michigan in 1956 and completed course work there toward a doctorate in English. She has taught English at Milledgeville (Illinois) High School, at Ohio University in Athens, and, as a teaching fellow, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
She is a co-author of two widely used college textbooks, The Bedford Reader and The Bedford Guide for College Writers, and of several college instructor’s manuals. She is also co-author of two award-winning books for children, Talking Like the Rain and Knock at a Star: A Child’s Introduction to Poetry. She has co-edited a collection of James Hayford’s poems for children, Knee-Deep in Blazing Snow: Growing Up in Vermont.
On her own, she has published two poetry anthologies for children, I Thought I’d Take My Rat to School and Make Things Fly. She has written articles for magazines including Empire State Realtor and Michigan Quarterly Review, and in the early 1970s was co-editor and publisher of a little magazine of poetry and criticism, Counter/Measures. In Spring 2000 her article, “The Power of Poetry Anthologies,” appeared in the bulletin of the Children’s Book Council.
Dorothy has been a featured speaker at a convention of the Core Knowledge Foundation, at the Foundation for Children’s Books, McNeese State University (Lake Charles, LA), at the Poetry Festival of Shenandoah University, the Murray State University (Kentucky) Writing Symposium, and elsewhere. She has appeared on closed circuit television before a network of classrooms in Massachusetts.
The Kennedys have five grown children and six grandchildren. They now live in Lexington, Mass., in a house half century-old and half new.
FOR MORE DETAILS . . .
About D.M.K., please see Contemporary Authors (Gale) and, about her children’s books in particular, Something About the Author (Gale).
X.J. Kennedy 