B L Kennedy

Growing up in the Bronx, in the hospital frequently for asthma and its complications, B. L. Kennedy developed interest in calligraphy and early poets like Keats, Shelley, Coleridge. As his beloved Bronx deteriorated, he lost friends to drugs and other forms of violence.  On a fateful subway ride, Kennedy saw newspaper headlines of the death of rock star, poet and personal hero Jim Morrison. When he later learned Californians got free higher education opportunities, he hitchhiked across the country and landed in Sacramento. He earned a GED, an AA from Sacramento City College, a BA and a double masters from CSUS and an MFA degree at Naropa University. In 1981 he created “The NeuroRomantic Inphasion,” an outre event featuring Fritz Leiber, Kenneth Anger, Robert Anton Wilson, Arthur Byron Cover, and many whose work skimmed dark and edgy areas of fiction and poetry, among other arts. 

Kennedy is the author of such collections as Jim Morrison Visits Disneyland, Sex Toy and Screaming Pygmies, and the originator of Landing Signals, a first-of-its-kind 1985 anthology of local poets; of October in the Railroad Earth, a tribute to Jack Kerouac in the form of an annual reading series that spanned a quarter century; and of the three up-all-weekend Java City poetry marathons, which have showcased hundreds of local poets at a time every 10 years since 1986.

Kennedy died at the age of seventy on October 21, 2024. (Bio from author’s obituary; photo credit: Florence Low, Sacramento Bee.)