(The Peacock Poems, Sherley Anne Williams’ first book of p...)
The Peacock Poems, Sherley Anne Williams’ first book of poetry, was nominated for a National Book Award. A former senior Fulbright lecturer at the University of Ghana and visiting professor at the University of Southern California and Cornell University, Williams is professor of literature at the University of California at San Diego. She had received an Emmy Award for a television performance of her poetry. She is advisory editor of Callaloo and Langston Hughes Review. Williams was graduated from California State University (B.A. 1966) and Brown University (M.A. 1972). Her home is in San Diego.
(This child’s view of the long day’s work in the cotton fi...)
This child’s view of the long day’s work in the cotton fields, simply expressed in a poet’s resonant language, is a fresh and stirring look at migrant family life. “With its restrained poetic text and impressionist paintings, this is a picture book for older readers, too.”
(Five friends get together one glorious Saturday morning. ...)
Five friends get together one glorious Saturday morning. They want to get away from the Projects, where their mothers will find them something to do, and away from little brothers, who spy on them. These girls could ride bikes. They could collect bottles for the recycler to get money for the movies. But they decide to go climb trees, and off they go--Hey, hey!
(Sherley A. Williams’ highly acclaimed historical novel de...)
Sherley A. Williams’ highly acclaimed historical novel details two women’s fierce strength of will and an unlikely bond despite racial barriers in the pre-civil war south.
Sherley Anne Williams was an American poet, novelist, professor, vocalist, Jazz poet, and social critic.
Background
Williams was born on August 25, 1944, in Bakersfield, California. She was a daughter of Jessee Winson Williams and Lelia Marie (Siler) Williams. Sherley Anne Williams was born in a family of 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. Looking back on her childhood, Williams later described her upbringing as "the most deprived, provincial kind of existence you can think of." At the age of eight, her father died of tuberculosis and when she was sixteen her mother died.
Education
Sherley Anne Williams attended junior and senior high school in Fresno, California. In 1966, she received a Bachelor of Arts from California State University at Fresno. In 1972, Sherley received a Master of Arts from Brown University.
In 1968, Williams 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 assumed 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. 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.
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. 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.