Williams, Sherley Anne (1944–1999)

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Williams, Sherley Anne (1944–1999)

African-American poet, novelist, playwright, educator, and literary critic . Born in Bakersfield, California, on August 25, 1944; died of cancer in San Diego, California, on July 6, 1999; daughter of Jessee Winson Williams and Lelia Marie (Siler) Williams; attended junior and senior high school in Fresno, California; California State University at Fresno, B.A., 1966; spent one year in graduate studies at Howard University; Brown University, M.A., 1972; children: John Malcolm (b. 1968).

Selected writings:

Give Birth to Brightness: A Thematic Study in Neo-Black Literature (1972); The Peacock Poems (1975); Some One Sweet Angel Chile (1982); Dessa Rose (1986); Letter from a New England Negro (play, 1991); Working Cotton (1992); Girls Together (1997).

Sherley Anne Williams was born in 1944 in Bakersfield, California, the daughter of Jessee Winson Williams and Lelia Siler Williams , migrant farm workers who struggled to make ends meet. The family lived in low-income housing projects throughout California's San Joaquin Valley, particularly in Fresno. To help earn enough to cover living expenses, young Sherley and her three sisters, Ruby, Lois , and Jesmarie , often picked cotton and fruit alongside their parents. When Sherley was just seven, her father died of tuberculosis, after which the family spent more time in Fresno, where she attended both junior and senior high school. Her mother died when she was 16, and the Williams sisters struggled even more desperately to survive and stay together as a family. Looking back on her childhood, Williams later described her upbringing as "the most deprived, provincial kind of existence you can think of."

Introduced to the delights of reading at an early age, Williams had been discouraged from this pursuit by her mother, who perhaps feared that reading might inspire her daughter towards goals that she could not possibly attain, given the family's impoverished state. Williams, however, was rescued by an eighth-grade science teacher who saw great promise and encouraged her to pursue college-prep courses. During high school, she rediscovered her love of language and determined that she would go to college. She later reflected: "To go from having no prospects at all to having seemingly limitless opportunity … well, in my case, I feel I just wasn't prepared for seemingly limitless opportunity."

After completing her high school studies, Williams attended California State University at Fresno, using earnings from farm work to help finance her tuition and earning a bachelor's degree in history in 1966. She then left California for Washington, D.C., where she pursued graduate studies at Howard University for one year. In 1968, she began working at Federal City College in the capital, and became a single mother when she gave birth to her son John Malcolm. That same year she was published for the first time, in the Massachusetts Review, with the short story "Tell Martha Not to Moan." The first-person narrative of a young black woman pregnant with her second child and abandoned by her musician lover, it has since gone on to republication in several anthologies.

After a few years in Washington, Williams moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where she taught in the Black Studies department of Brown University and resumed her graduate studies. In 1972, she earned a master's degree from Brown and left shortly thereafter to assume an associate professorship at California State University in Fresno. Three years later, she traveled south to join the faculty of the University of California at San Diego, where she served as a professor of literature until her death.

Williams first attracted attention in literary circles with the 1972 publication of Give Birth to Brightness: A Thematic Study in Neo-Black Literature, a work of literary criticism in which she assessed the writings of such African-American notables as James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, and Ernest Gaines and contended that most black heroes in contemporary fiction had their

roots in black folklore. Three years later, she became known as a poet with the publication of The Peacock Poems, a nominee for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in Poetry in 1976. The volume of autobiographical poems explored her early family life and her feelings as a single mother, as well as the precarious existence of low-income African-American women in general. The blues poetry so prevalent in Peacock Poems carried over into her next volume of poetry, 1982's Some One Sweet Angel Chile, which was also nominated for a National Book Award. Among the four sections in the book is one that focuses on Bessie Smith , "Regular Reefer," and another, "Letters from a New England Negro," that details the life of a freeborn African-American woman teaching exslaves in the South after the Civil War. With these two collections, Williams was firmly established as an important new voice in African-American poetry. She later received an Emmy Award for a television performance of poems from Some One Sweet Angel Chile.

Williams made her debut as a novelist in 1986 with Dessa Rose, a work often compared to the writings of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker because of its mystical qualities. Set in and around antebellum Charleston, South Carolina, the novel explores the unusual relationship between a wealthy young white plantation mistress and a slave named Dessa, who conspire to dupe white planters by selling them slaves who are later helped to escape. (Both were based on historical characters, a slave who led an insurrection while pregnant in 1829 and a white woman in North Carolina, although in real life their paths did not cross.) David Bradley, reviewing the novel in The New York Times, called it "artistically brilliant, emotionally affecting, and totally unforgettable," and went on to note that while Williams "shows that she can write a novel better than a lot of novelists, nowhere does she cut herself off from her poetic roots."

Williams' one-woman play, Letter from a New England Negro, was staged in 1991 at the National Black Theater Festival and a year later at the Chicago International Theater Festival. Her first children's book, Working Cotton (1992), won the Caldecott Award of the American Library Association as well as a Coretta Scott King Book Award. It was followed by a second children's book, Girls Together, in 1997. At the time of her death from cancer in 1999, at age 54, Williams was working on both a novel set in contemporary times and a sequel to Dessa Rose.