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Janis F. Kearney | |
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| Born | September 29, 1953 Gould, Arkansas, United States |
| Education | Bachelor of Arts in Journalism |
| Alma mater | University of Arkansas |
| Known for | Personal diarist to President Bill Clinton |
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| Children | 1 |
| Website | janisfkearney |
Janis Faye Kearney (born September 29, 1953) is an American author, lecturer, and publisher. She served as a personal diarist to President Bill Clinton from 1995 to 2001.
Janis F. Kearney was born in Gould, Arkansas to Ethel V. Curry Kearney and Thomas James Kearney; she is the 14th of 19 children. Janis’ father was a sharecropper, [1] and her mother was a homemaker, who spent much of her time, assisting her husband with the family's cotton crops.
From the age of seven, Janis spent her summers chopping cotton, and autumns helping the family pick cotton. By the age of nine, she was also helping care for her younger siblings, and cooking for the family. However, every evening she and her siblings learned reading, writing, and arithmetic at home; they always returned to school in the winter at the top of their classes. [1]
All except one of the Kearney children graduated from college and most went on to graduate school, law school, or both. [1] Many attended some of the top colleges and universities in the country including Harvard, Yale, Brown, Vanderbilt, and Stanford. [2]
After graduating from Gould High School in 1971, Janis attended the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. She married and had one child during her junior year in college; but she went on to earn a B.A. in journalism in 1976. [3] She continued her education while working, earning thirty hours towards a M.P.A. from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
Kearney was hired by the State of Arkansas in 1978, where she spent three years as a program manager for the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act program, and another six years as the director of information for the national headquarters of the Migrant Student Records Transfer System. [1]
In 1987, she became the managing editor of the Arkansas State Press newspaper, owned and operated by civil rights activist Daisy Bates. Three months after Janis joined the paper, Bates retired and Kearney bought the company from her. [4] Janis published the weekly newspaper in Arkansas for five years before joining the Clinton-Gore presidential campaign in 1992. [1]
In 1992, when then governor Bill Clinton decided to run for U.S. President, he hired Kearney who he had met during her years with State Government, from her role as publisher of the Arkansas State Press, and as part of the Arkansas Kearney family; to serve as director of his campaign's Minority Media Outreach effort. [1] Governor Clinton had taught several of her brothers during his stint as a professor of law at the University of Arkansas, and later appointed three members of the family to high-level state jobs. Janis took a sabbatical from her newspaper in 1992, and appointed her sister, Janetta Kearney, to run the newspaper during her absence.
Following the 1993 election, Kearney worked in the Little Rock office of the Clinton presidential transition. After the president's inauguration, she was one of the Arkansans invited to join the President in Washington, D.C. She worked first as a White House media affairs officer and then as director of public communication for the U.S. Small Business Administration. In 1995 Kearney was appointed to serve as the first-ever personal diarist to a President.
In her role Kearney kept a daily diary of President Clinton's days, attending meetings, events, and press conferences to create a living history. In 1998 she was subpoenaed to testify before a Kenneth Starr grand jury to investigate the Clinton sex scandal. Her diary of the President's days was subpoenaed. No wrongdoing was found. [5] The diary would eventually be passed on to the Clinton Library.
In 2001, Janis moved to Chicago, but began a two-year Fellowship at the Harvard University W. E. B. Du Bois Institute of African and African American Studies, where she began writing her Clinton biography, Conversations: William Jefferson Clinton-From Hope to Harlem. [6]
She continued her research and writing of Conversations as a visiting fellow at DePaul University. In 2003, she was appointed Chancellor's Lecturer for Chicago City Colleges. [7] During that time Janis also wrote a syndicated column, Politics Is Life, which appeared in African-American newspapers throughout the country. [8] Eventually, Conversations was published in 2006, and features interviews with more than 100 African-American acquaintances, and President Clinton.
Kearney began working on her first book, Cotton Field of Dreams, in 1973, which focused on her father's life story. After years of shopping her manuscript at writers’ workshops, she began revising the book to personal memoir, which included vignettes about her father and the rest of the family. She revised the book over the next ten years. Kearney established Writing Our World (WOW) Press in 2004, and published "Cotton Field of Dreams" that same year. [1]
In November 2008, Kearney published her first novel, Once Upon a Time There Was A Girl: A Murder at Mobile Bay. She also published a second memoir, Something to Write Home About: Memories of a Presidential Diarist. She also wrote a biography of her mentor Daisy Gatson Bates in 2013, "Daisy: Between a Rock and a Hard Place," and a book about her father's amazing life journey, "Sundays with TJ: 100 Years of Memories on Varner Road," published in 2014. Janis was inducted into the Arkansas Writers Hall of Fame in 2016, and that same year received the prestigious University of Arkansas Lemke Journalism Award. In 2014, Janis with the help of a small group of Arkansas women, founded the Celebrate! Maya Project, a nonprofit whose mission is to share Maya Angelou's life and legacy with schools and communities, and to create and implement arts, literacy and poetry programs for youth around the state. In 2015, she founded the Read.Write.Share Writers Weekend, in response to new and emerging writers' need to interact with other writers and to share their stories with others.
Elizabeth Ward Gracen is an American actress and beauty pageant contestant who won the title of Miss America in 1982.
Go Ask Alice is a 1971 book about a teenage girl who develops a drug addiction at age 15 and runs away from home on a journey of self-destructive escapism. Attributed to "Anonymous", the book is in diary form, and was originally presented as being the edited actual diary of the unnamed teenage protagonist. Questions about the book's authenticity and true authorship began to arise in the late 1970s, and Beatrice Sparks is now generally viewed as the author of the found manuscript–styled fictional document. Sparks went on to write numerous other books purporting to be real diaries of troubled teenagers. Some sources have also named Linda Glovach as a co-author of the book. Nevertheless, its popularity has endured, and, as of 2014, it had remained continuously in print since its publication over four decades earlier.
Elizabeth Ann Eckford is an American civil rights activist and one of the Little Rock Nine, a group of African American students who, in 1957, were the first black students ever to attend classes at the previously all-white Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The integration came as a result of the 1954 United States Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education. Eckford's public ordeal was captured by press photographers on the morning of September 4, 1957, after she was prevented from entering the school by the Arkansas National Guard. A dramatic snapshot by Will Counts of the Arkansas Democrat showed the young girl being followed and threatened by an angry white mob; this and other photos of the day's startling events were circulated around the US and the world by the press.
Lottie H. Shackelford is an American politician who in 1987 was the first woman appointed Mayor of Little Rock, Arkansas. In 1993, President Bill Clinton appointed her to the Board of Directors of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), making her the first African-American woman to serve in that role. She also is the longest serving Vice Chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), having held the office for 20 years.
Daisy Bates was an American civil rights activist, publisher, journalist, and lecturer who played a leading role in the Little Rock Integration Crisis of 1957.
Ernestine Hill was an Australian journalist, travel writer and novelist. Known for her various travels across Australia and her writings about the diverse landscapes and cultures in the country, she published books such as The Great Australian Loneliness in 1937 and The Territory in 1951. She also wrote a novel, My Love Must Wait, published in 1941.
The Stone Diaries is a 1993 novel by Carol Shields.
Fannie Flagg is an American actress, comedian, and author. She is best known as a semi-regular panelist on the 1973–1982 versions of the game show Match Game and for the 1987 novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, which she adapted into the script for the 1991 motion picture Fried Green Tomatoes. She was nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay adaptation. Flagg lives in California and Alabama.
Mary Boykin Chesnut was an American writer noted for a book published as her Civil War diary, a "vivid picture of a society in the throes of its life-and-death struggle." She described the war from within her upper-class circles of Southern slaveowner society, but encompassed all classes in her book. She was married to James Chesnut Jr., a lawyer who served as a United States senator and officer in the Confederate States Army.
Melba Joy Patillo Beals is an American journalist and educator who was a member of the Little Rock Nine, a group of black students who were the first to racially integrate Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Debra J. Dickerson is an American author, editor, writer, and contributing writer and blogger for Mother Jones magazine. Dickerson has been most prolific as an essayist, writing on race relations and racial identity in the United States.
Rut "Rutka" Laskier was a Jewish Polish diarist who is best known for her 1943 diary chronicling the three months of her life during the Holocaust in Poland. She was murdered at Auschwitz concentration camp in 1943 at the age of fourteen. Her manuscript, authenticated by Holocaust scholars and survivors, was published in the Polish language in early 2006. English and Hebrew translations were released the following year. It has been compared to the diary of Anne Frank.
Margaret Ann Williams is a former director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University and is a partner in Griffin Williams, a management-consulting firm.
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Former U.S. President Bill Clinton's public image is most notably characterized by high public approval ratings, aided by his youthful appearance, as well as his charismatic, and soundbite-ready style of speech. His personal background and lifestyle led to Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison to call him the first "black president". Clinton was also dogged by investigations throughout his presidency, particularly of sexual misconduct, damaging the public's beliefs of his trustworthiness, though his approval ratings remained high, even as his impeachment trial continued.
The Arkansas State Press was an African-American newspaper published from 1941 to 1959. Dubbed "Little Rock's leading African-American newspaper," its owners and editors were Daisy Bates and L. C. Bates. According to historians, the newspaper was "believed by many to be instrumental in bringing about the desegregation of the Little Rock public schools."
Lucy Rebecca Buck was an American diarist.
Josetta Edwards Wilkins was an educator, counselor, and state legislator in Arkansas. She served four terms in the Arkansas House of Representatives from 1991 to 1999.
Hillary Clinton served as the first lady of the United States from 1993 until 2001, during the presidency of her husband Bill Clinton.
Hillary Clinton served as first lady of Arkansas during the two governorships of her husband, Bill Clinton. During her husband's first governorship, she was known as Hillary Rodham. However, in his second governorship, she made use of the name Hillary Rodham Clinton.
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