William Joseph Kennedy (born January 16, 1928) is an American writer and journalist. He was born and raised in Albany, New York. He studied in Siena College. He was inspired by Gore Vidal, William Shakespeare, and by Edgar Allan Poe.

Kennedy's works include The Ink Truck (1969), Legs (1975), Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (1978), Ironweed (1983, winner of the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; movie, 1987), and Roscoe (2002).

In 2011, he published Changó's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes, which one reviewer called a book "written with such brio and encompassing humanity that it may well deserve to be called the best of the bunch".^[1]

In 1953, Kennedy married Ana Segarra. They have three children. He lives in Averill Park, New York.

• Douglas R. Allen, Mona Simpson (Winter 1989). "William Kennedy, The Art of Fiction No. 111". The Paris Review. Winter 1989 (112).
• Finding Aid for the Papers of William Kennedy,
• Audio recording of William Kennedy reading from unpublished works at the Key West Literary Seminar, 2009
• Write TV Public Television Interview with William Kennedy Archived 2016-12-06 at the Wayback Machine
• 2011 radio interview at The Bat Segundo Show
• M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives Archived 2013-02-18 at the Wayback Machine, University at Albany Libraries.

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