Williams authored several other novels, includ-
ing The Angry Ones (1960). Night Song (1961),
Sissie (1963), Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light: A
Novel of Some Probability (1969), Captain Black-
man (1972), The Junior Bachelor Society (1976),
Click Song (1982), The Berhama Account (1985),
and Jacob’s Ladder (1987). He is also the editor
(with Charles F. Harris) of Amistad I and Amis-
tad II and McGraw-Hill’s Bridges: Literature across
Culture (1993).
Williams has received several awards and hon-
ors, including a National Institute of Arts and
Letters award, a Linback Award from Rutgers Uni-
versity, and an American Book Award from the Be-
fore Columbus Foundation. He lives in New York
with his second wife, Lorrain Isaac Williams.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Muller, Gilbert. John A. Williams. Boston: Twayne,
1984.
George Barlow
Williams, Sherley Anne (1944–1999)
Novelist, poet, playwright, professor, and critic
Sherley Anne Williams was born on August 25,
1944, in Bakersfield, California, to Lena-Leila
Marie Siler and Jesse Winson. The daughter of mi-
grant workers, Williams described her upbringing
as “the most deprived, provincial kind of existence
you can think of.” After her father’s death when she
was eight, the family was forced to go on welfare.
When she was 16, her mother died, and Williams,
cared for by her loving older sister Ruby, survived
by working in the same dusty San Joaquin Valley
fruit orchards and cotton fields where her parents
had endured back-breaking work.
Williams relates how she discovered in the au-
tobiographies of Eartha Kitt and Ethel Waters the
stories of strong, successful black women who had
endured childhood poverty, who “had had to cope
with early and forced sex and sexuality, with moth-
ers who could not express love in the terms that
they desperately needed” (768), and how “it was
largely through these autobiographies I was able to
take heart in my life” (770). Her love of language
and literature was born from her determined
search in libraries for the kinds of books she rarely
found in her classes: “No book affected my life so
much as reading LANGSTON HUGHES’s Montage on
a Dream Deferred, for here was my life and my lan-
guage coming at me” (770).
Encouraged by teachers, Williams enrolled at
California State University (CSU) Fresno, where
she earned a bachelor’s degree in English in 1966.
A year later, her first short story, “Tell Martha Not
to Moan” (1967), was published. She did graduate
work at Fisk with ROBERT HAYDEN and with STER-
LING BROWN at Howard University, and completed
a master’s degree in American literature at Brown
University in 1972, deciding to discontinue the
Ph.D. program in which she was enrolled there in
order to focus on being a writer rather than a critic.
Williams taught briefly at CSU Fresno before be-
coming the first African-American literature pro-
fessor at the University of California at San Diego
in 1973, where she taught until her death at age 54.
Williams was also a Senior Fulbright Lecturer at
the University of Ghana in 1984.
While women’s lives have been the focus of her
creative work, her major critical text, Give Birth
to Brightness: A Thematic Study in Neo-Black Lit-
erature (1972), focuses primarily on AMIRI BARAKA,
JAMES BALDWIN, and ERNEST GAINES, exploring the
ways in which black writers of the 1960s and 1970s
were creating a new language—one quite different
from earlier black writers—and devoting chapters
to the black musician as hero/lawbreaker, “The
Streetman” as hero and “Light Bearer,” as well as a
chapter on the limitations of middle-class literary
heroes.
Unsuccessful at getting her first novel published
(and unwilling to capitulate to the publisher’s sug-
gestions that she involve its protagonist, a domes-
tic, in prostitution, Williams saw a nine-year hiatus
occur between her writing of “Meditations on His-
tory” (a story written partly in repudiation of Wil-
liam Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner, which she
later expanded into her novel DESSA ROSE) and the
publication of the story in 1980.
Her earlier Peacock Poems (1975), nominated for
both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award,
introduces Odessa, namesake and touchstone forWilliams, Sherley Anne 553