About the Book
The most popular introductory anthology of its kind, Kennedy/Gioia's
Literature continues to inspire people with engaging insights on reading and writing about stories, poems, and plays. Now
The Literature Collection presents all of this content in a vibrant and interactive online reading experience. Click here to find out more: http: //media.pearsoncmg.com/long/kennedy_collection_demo/KC2Ccamproj.html.
KEY TOPICS: Poets in their own right, editors X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia bring personal warmth and a human perspective to this comprehensive collection.
The Literature Collection presents readable discussions of literary devices, illustrated by engaging works, supported by useful writing tips, along with seven chapters devoted to writing about literature.
The Collection includes over 600 selections and trusted pedagogy, valuable teaching resources, engaging multimedia and, of course, full access to MyLiteratureLab:
MARKET: For anyone who appreciates literature presented with personal warmth and a human perspective and wants to enjoy the experience via online access.
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. After years of writing and reading late in the evenings after work, he quit a corporate vice presidency to write. He has published four collections of poetry,
Daily Horoscope (1986),
The Gods of Winter (1991),
Interrogations at Noon (2001), which won the American Book Award, and
Pity the Beautiful (2012); 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. From 2003-2009 he served as the Chairman of the National Endowments 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 literary reading by creating The Big Read, which helped reverse a quarter century of decline in U.S. reading. He is currently the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California.
