Rest in Peace, Maurice Kenny (1929–2016)

We are saddened to report that poet and SUNY professor Maurice Kenny--known for poetry that explored his Mohawk heritage--has passed away at the age of 86. "Mr. Kenny, who taught literature and poetry at colleges in his native New York State, was best known for two works, published a decade apart, in which he gave voices to both whites and Native Americans in their encounters before the Revolutionary War," writes The New York Times.

His books include Carving Hawk: New & Selected Poems, 1953-2000 and In the Time of the Present: New Poems. Kenny was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas, and an American Book Award for his 1984 collection The Mama Poems. More from the NYT:

As much as Mr. Kenny’s roots and interests were in northern New York, he was hardly confined to that region. He lived in Mexico, the Virgin Islands and Chicago before spending many years living in Brooklyn Heights. In the poem “The Steelworker,” whose subject is seen “riding the sky on steel girders,” he touched on the enormous contributions of Mohawk construction workers to the rise of the Manhattan skyline.

He also chronicled in poems his peripatetic road journeys, mostly to points west, in the collection “Greyhounding This America” in 1988. “The cat paws of dawn scratch/the edges of the Yellowstone,” he wrote in a poem about that river.

Maurice Francis Kenny was born in Watertown, N.Y., on Aug. 16, 1929. His father was of Mohawk-Irish descent; his mother was part Seneca. His parents separated when he was a teenager, and he lived for a time with his mother in Bayonne, N.J. He developed an interest in Iroquois culture when he moved back upstate to live with his father.

Mr. Kenny attended Butler University in Indiana, St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., and New York University, where he studied with the American poet Louise Bogan, a turning point in his career, he said.

His poems have been translated into several languages, including Russian. He founded the Strawberry Press in 1976 to publish Native American writers.

Read the full obituary here. And find three poems by Maurice Kenny at BOMB.