Janis F. Kearney

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.

Early life and education 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, 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.

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. She continued her education while working, earning thirty hours towards a M.P.A. from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

Professional career 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. Janis published the weekly newspaper in Arkansas for five years before joining the Clinton-Gore presidential campaign in 1992. The diary would eventually be passed on to the Clinton Library.

Journalistic and publishing activities 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.

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. During that time Janis also wrote a syndicated column, Politics Is Life, which appeared in African-American newspapers throughout the country. 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.

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.