Williams, Kenny J. (Kenny Jackson), 1927-2003

Born in Omaha, NE, Kenny Williams grew up in Chicago where her father served as a Baptist pastor. She received a B.A. from Benedict College in 1949, her first M.A. degree from De Paul University in 1950, and her second M.A. and her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1959 and 1961, respectively. After teaching at Tennessee A and I State University, and at Northeastern Illinois State University, she joined the faculty of the Duke English Department in 1977, where she specialized in Midwestern and African-American literature. In 1991 she was nominated by President George H. W. Bush to the advisory counsel of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Among her published works include They Also Spoke: An Essay on Negro Literature in America, 1787-1930, In the City of Men: Another Story of Chicago, Prairie Voices: A Literary History of Chicago from the Frontier to 13 and A Storyteller for a City: Sherwood Anderson's Chicago. At the time of her death in 2003, Williams had been writing on literature of the Civil War era for the Dictionary of Literary Biography series.

Kenny Jackson Williams (1927-2003), named after Kentucky, the state in which she was born, received her Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. She taught at several universities before joining the English Department at Duke University in Durham, N.C., in 1977. Williams published extensively on African American writers, Sherwood Anderson, and other midwestern writers of the nineteenth century. In 1991, President George H. W. Bush appointed her to the Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Kenny J. Williams died in 2003.

Kenny Williams was a professor of English at Duke University where she specialized in Midwestern and African-American literature.