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.

Dr. Kronenfeld is both a scholar and a poet (as well as a more occasional writer of fiction, memoir, essays and reviews). 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. She has published over a dozen articles on Renaissance and other literary topics in various journals, including Shakespeare Quarterly and ELH, as well as a good number of reviews; 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 an article of hers 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. Her in-depth historical-cultural-linguistic study, King Lear and the Naked Truth: Rethinking the Language of Religion and Resistance was published by Duke University Press in 1998. Because of it, Dr. Kronenfeld was named one of the two recipients of the University of California, Riverside, 1996-97 non-Senate Distinguished Researcher Award.

In midlife, Judy Kronenfeld turned back to her childhood love of writing poetry. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines such as Natural Bridge, The Portland Review, Passages North, Hubbub, Poetry International, Chariton Review, Kansas Quarterly, The Manhattan Poetry Review, The Evansville Review, The Mississippi Valley Review, The Louisville Review, The MacGuffin, Shirim, Spillway, Pebble Lake Review, 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), and Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease (Kent State University Press, 2009). She is the author of two chapbooks, Disappeared Down Dark Wells and Still Falling (Inevitable Press, 2000), and Ghost Nurseries (Finishing Line, 2005), and two full-length collections, Shadow of Wings (Bellflower, 1991) and Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths (The Litchfield Review Press, 2008), which won the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Award in 2007.

Judy Kronenfeld has also published stories, personal essays and reviews of books of poetry and poetry magazines in The Madison Review, The North American Review, Potpourri, The Crescent Review, Under the Sun, Chelsea, and The Literary Magazine Review.

She is an Associate Editor of the online poetry magazine, Poemeleon.