Judy Kronenfeld was born in Manhattan and raised in the Bronx. Her parents were both European immigrants. She graduated summa cum laude from Smith College, and won a prize there for the best undergraduate thesis in English for her monograph-length essay on the poetry of Gerard Manly Hopkins. She received her Ph.D. in English Literature (with a specialization in the English Renaissance) from Stanford University in 1971. While researching her dissertation at the Bodleian Library on a Leverhulme Fellowship, she was a Recognized Student at Oxford University. In midlife, she turned back to her childhood love of writing poetry. She has taught English Literature at the University of California, Irvine, the University of California, Riverside, and Purdue University, and, for twenty-five years has taught Creative Writing in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, where she is now Lecturer Emerita.

Judy Kronenfeld is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, Shadow of Wings (Bellflower, 1991) and Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths (Litchfield Review Press, 2008), which won the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Award. She has also published two chapbooks, Disappeared Down Dark Wells and Still Falling (Inevitable Press, 2000), and Ghost Nurseries (Finishing Line, 2005).

Her poems have appeared in numerous print and online magazines such as Natural Bridge, Portland Review, Passages North, Hubbub, Poetry International, Chariton Review, Kansas Quarterly, Manhattan Poetry Review, Evansville Review, Mississippi Valley Review, Louisville Review, The MacGuffin, Stirring, Spillway, Hiram Poetry Review, Snake Nation Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Pedestal, Barnwood, The Women's Review of Books, Calyx and Cimarron Review. Her poems have also appeared in a dozen anthologies and textbooks including Red, White & Blues: Poets on the Promise of America (Iowa, 2004), Blue Arc West: An Anthology of California Poets (Tebot Bach, 2006), Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease (Kent State, 2009), and Love over 60: An Anthology of Women's Poems (Mayapple, 2010). She has also published stories in Madison Review, North American Review, Potpourri, Crescent Review, and Women Writers: A Zine, and personal essays and reviews in Under the Sun, Chelsea, and Literary Magazine Review, among other places. She has given over seventy readings of her work, mostly in Southern California.

Dr. Kronenfeld has published more than a dozen articles on Renaissance and other literary topics in various journals, including Shakespeare Quarterly and ELH, as well as a number of reviews of scholarly books. An article of hers on King Lear was reprinted in Shakespearean Criticism Yearbook 1992: A Selection of the Year's Most Noteworthy Studies of Shakespeare's Plays and Poetry and her essay on Western criticism of African literature in English was twice reprinted, in Critical Perspectives on Nigerian Literature, ed. Bernth Lindfors, and in Research on Wole Soyinka, ed. James Gibbs and Bernth Lindfors, respectively. Dr. Kronenfeld was named one of the two recipients of the University of California, Riverside, 1996-97 non-Senate Distinguished Researcher Award because of her critical book, King Lear and the Naked Truth (Duke U.P., 1998), a ground-breaking study of Shakespeare’s play in its cultural, historical and linguistic context and in the context of contemporary criticism.