Theda Kenyon


Theda Kenyon was an American writer and educator. She wrote novels, poetry, short stories, a play, song lyrics, and a book on witchcraft, Witches Still Live: A Study of the Black Art Today.

Early life and education

Kenyon was from Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of theologian and Protestant Episcopal pastor Ralph Wood Kenyon and Elise Chesebrough Rathbun Kenyon. She graduated from Packer Collegiate Institute.

Career

Kenyon taught poetry classes at Hunter College. She held a residency at the MacDowell Colony in 1928. She was a member of the executive board of the Poetry Society of America, and an early promoter of the poet James Still, who was once her student. She gave poetry readings, sometimes in historical costumes, and was poetry chair of the New York City Federation of Women's Clubs. Brooklyn painter Stanislav Rembski painted her portrait in the 1920s.
Most of Kenyon's novels were historical in setting, and several were based on biographies of historical figures, including Joan of Arc, Anne Hutchinson, and Richard Fanning Loper. In 1941, she performed a dramatic version of her novel-in-verse, Scarlet Anne, for a women's club in Virginia. She was guest of honor at a 1963 meeting of the Pen Women of Atlantic City.

Publications

Poetry

  • "Tipperary Comes to Bagdad"
  • "Beyond the Well"
  • "The Hooverish Child"
  • "The Vestment Maker"
  • "Out of the Desert"
  • "Pan Adolescent"
  • "Leah"
  • "The Ship Model"
  • "Service", "A Valentine", and "For a Library Door"
  • "Three Poems"
  • "Dead Letters"
  • "Widowhood"
  • "I Pray"

Fiction

  • "The Passing of Sarah"
  • "The Gay Tyrant"
  • Certain Ladies
  • "The House of the Golden Eyes"
  • Scarlet Anne
  • Pendulum
  • The Golden Feather
  • Black Dawn
  • The Skipper from Stonington
  • Something Gleamed
  • ''Jeanne''

Other

  • "My Rose"
  • Gooseberries
  • "Witches Still Live"
  • ''Witches Still Live: A Study of the Black Art Today''

Personal life

Kenyon lived at the Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel in Atlantic City in the 1960s, and made books for hospitalized children from donated Christmas cards. She died in 1997, in Montclair, New Jersey, at the age of 103.