Kennedy was born Adrienne Hawkins, the daughter of Cornell Wallace Hawkins and Etta Haugabook Hawkins, on September 13, 1931, in Pittsburgh, PA. Her family moved to Cleveland, OH, four years later, and she grew up there. She received her B.A. from the Ohio State University in 1953; two weeks later she married Joseph C. Kennedy on May 15, 1953; they have two sons, Joseph Jr. and Adam. Kennedy studied creative writing at Columbia University in New York City from 1954—1956 and continued her studies at the American Theatre Wing (1958). In 1962, she submitted her first play Funnyhouse of a Negro to Edward Albee's workshop at Circle-in-the-Square School. Albee produced the play off-Broadway, directed by Michael Kahn , for which Kennedy won an Obie Award for Distinguished Play. Kennedy divorced her husband in 1966 and moved to London for the next three years. From 1963 to 1969, Kennedy wrote prolifically, and seven of her plays were produced. Kennedy continued write through the 1970s, supported by a series of grants from various endowments.

She has since taught creative writing at Yale University, Princeton University, the University of California Berkeley, and the University of California Davis.

Ms. Kennedy has won two Obie Awards: "Distinguished Play" in 1964 for Funnyhouse of a Negro, and "Best new American Play" in 1996 for June and Jean in Concert and Sleep Deprivation Chamber. In 1994 she won both the Lila Wallace...Reader's Digest Writers' Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters in Literature Award. She was also granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing (1967), two Rockefeller Foundation Grants (1967 & 1970), a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1972), the Creative Artists Public Service grant in 1974, the 2003 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, and the Pierre Lecomte du Novy Award

Kennedy was playwright-in-residence at the Signature Theatre in New York City during their 1996-1997 season. Seven of her plays were performed during her residency.

In 2003, Ms. Kennedy was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Literature by her undergraduate alma mater, the Ohio State University.

Ms. Kennedy was honored at the 2008 Obie Awards with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Suzanne Alexander is a recurring character in several of Kennedy's plays. She Talks to Beethoven, The Ohio State Murders, The Film Club, and The Dramatic Circle are collectively known as the Alexander Plays, and were published together under that title in 1992. Also published in 1992 was a letter written from Suzanne Alexander's perspective "Letter to My Students on My Sixty-First Birthday by Suzanne Alexander". The Alexander plays are characterized by less overt surrealism than many of Kennedy's earlier works, but still avoid linear narrative. In the foreword to the printed collection of plays, Alisa Solomon writes "the action of these plays is made up not of the events of Suzanne's life but of the process of turning memory into meaning."

Plays

• Funnyhouse of a Negro, 1962
• The Owl Answers, 1963
• A Rat's Mass, 1967 (revised as an improvisational jazz opera A Rat's Mass/Procession in Shout in 1976)
• The Lennon play: In His Own Write (Adapted from John Lennon's In his own write and A Spaniard in the Works; with Victor Spinetti), 1967
• A Beast's Story, 1969 (produced with The Owl Answers under the title Cities in Bezique)
• Boats, 1969
• Sun (monologue), 1969
• A Lesson in Dead Language, 1968
• Electra and Orestes (adapted from the plays by Euripedes), 1972
• An Evening with Dead Essex (one-act documentary drama), 1972
• A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, 1976
• A Lancashire Lad (children's musical), 1980
• Black Children's Day (children's play), 1980
• Diary of Lights ("A Musical Without Songs"), 1987
• She Talks to Beethoven (one-act play, later collected as part of The Alexander Plays), 1989
• The Ohio State Murders (one-act play, later collected as part of The Alexander Plays), 1992
• The Film Club (A Monologue by Suzanne Alexander), published 1992
• The Dramatic Circle (radio play based on the events in the monologue The Film Club; published in 1994 in Moon Marked and Touched By Sun: plays by African-American women, edited by Sydné Mahone), 1992
• Motherhood 2000 (single scene short play), 1994
• June and Jean in Concert (play version of Kennedy's book People Who Led to My Plays), 1995
• Sleep Deprivation Chamber (with her son, Adam Kennedy), 1996
• Mom, How Did You Meet the Beatles? (with Adam Kennedy), 2008

Other Works

• "Because of the King of France", 1960
• People Who Led to My Plays (memoir), 1987
• Deadly Triplets (novella), 1990
• "Letter to My Students on My Sixty-First Birthday by Suzanne Alexander" (essay), 1992
• "Secret Paragraphs about My Brother" (essay), 1996
• "A Letter to Flowers" (essay), 1998
• "Sisters Etta and Ella (excerpt from a narrative)", 1999
• "Grendel and Grendel's Mother" (essay), 1999