William Joseph Kennedy is an American writer and journalist born and raised in Albany, New York. Many of his novels feature the interaction of members of the fictional Irish-American Phelan family, and make use of incidents of Albany's history and the supernatural.

His notable works include The Ink Truck (1969), Legs (1975), Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (1978), and Ironweed (1983), which won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was later adapted into a film in 1987. Another notable work is Roscoe (2002).