Join us as we welcome special guest, Janis F. Kearney, author and presidential diarist of Bill Clinton, who will give a talk at 6 p.m. Monday, Feb. 12, in Ross Pendergraft Library and Technology Center, room 300. A reception sponsored by the ATU Black Faculty and Staff Organization along with the Minority Mentorship Program will be held in at 4:30 prior to the lecture. Admission will be free and everyone is welcome.
Kearney’s latest book, Only on Sundays: Mahalia Jackson’s Long Journey, is a biography about Mahalia Jackson, famed gospel singer and civil rights activist. Mahalia Jackson sold over 22 million records during her career that spanned the 1940s to the 1970s, and is considered one of the most influential gospel vocalists of the twentieth century. Only on Sundays takes a look back at Jackson’s life at the turn of the 20th century in America, and explores one black southern woman’s struggle to attain the American dream.
Author Janis F. Kearney is a native of Gould in southeast Arkansas, earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and embarked upon a public service career that included nine years as a project manager and public affairs director in Arkansas state government.
After working alongside civil rights pioneer Daisy L. Gatson Bates as managing editor for the Arkansas State Press newspaper, Kearney purchased the publication and became its publisher upon Bates’ retirement in 1988.
Kearney served in the administration of U.S. President Bill Clinton from 1993-2001. She fulfilled the roles of media affairs office staff member and director of communications for the U.S. Small Business Administration before her appointment in 1995 as the first personal diarist to a U.S. president. She continued in that role through June 2001.
Harvard University selected Kearney for a two-year fellowship at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute of African and African American Studies in 2001. There, she began writing a Clinton biography, published as Conversations: William Jefferson Clinton, from Hope to Harlem in 2006. She went on to co-found Writing our World Publishing in 2003 and has written or co-written 17 books.
For more information about the ATU Second Monday Author Series and other events in the library, contact Luke Heffley at (479) 964-0546 or follow us on social media: Instagram, Facebook, or X.
