Nellie Y. McKay

Nellie Yvonne McKay (May 12, 1930 – January 22, 2006) was an American academic and author who was the Evjue-Bascom Professor of American and African-American Literature at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she also taught in English and women's studies, and is best known as the co-editor (with Henry Louis Gates Jr.) of the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature.

Biography She was born in Queens, New York City, as Nellie Yvonne Reynolds, to parents who were Jamaican immigrants. A former student recalls that, in 1979, McKay provided the class with photocopied versions of Native Son by Richard Wright and Black Manhattan by James Weldon Johnson, books that were then out of print, from her own rare copies.

According to The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, in 1991 she was offered the Harvard University post in Afro-American Studies that was later taken by Gates, whom she had recommended in her stead.

By the time she collaborated with Gates on the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature, in 1996, she was already widely known as a pre-eminent scholar in the field of black American literature, and Gates specifically sought her out. The book became a worldwide standard in the field and remains in print in a second edition. It was selected by former Poet Laureate of the United States Rita Dove in 2000 for the National Millennium Time Capsule created by the White House to be stored by the National Archives until the 22nd century, with Dove calling it "a lucid and eloquent history of one of this country's most significant subcultures".

Her edited book Critical Essays on Toni Morrison (1988) is "largely credited with establishing the critical acclaim" that led to Morrison's Nobel Prize in Literature.

She was also advisory editor for the African American Review, president of the Midwest Consortium of Black Studies

McKay died on January 22, 2006, of liver cancer or colon cancer The UW–Madison Chancellor's Distinguished Teaching Award (1992) Multi-Ethnic Literature [Association] of the U.S. (MELUS) Annual Award for Contributions to Multi-Ethnic Literature (1996) The University of Wisconsin System Recognition for Outstanding Contributions to the System, particularly to Women of Color Inducted into Phi Beta Kappa (alpha chapter of WI) 1999 Inducted into the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters (2001)

Writings McKay wrote more than 60 articles and essays in books and journals on figures such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker, touching on themes of black literature, American Literature, women's writings and on political issues of interest to the academic community.

Books Jean Toomer, Artist: A Study of His Literary Life and Work, 1894–1936 (University of North Carolina, 1984), Critical Essays on Toni Morrison (editor, with introduction, G.K. Hall, 1988), Race-Ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (with Toni Morrison and Michael Thelwell, Random House, 1992), The Sleeper Wakes: Harlem Renaissance Stories by Women (with Marcy Knopf, Rutgers University Press, 1993), Colored Woman in a White World (African-American Women Writers, 1910-1940) (with Mary Church Terrell, Macmillan Publishers, 1996), Norton Anthology of African-American Literature (General co-editor with Henry Louis Gates Jr.; W.W. Norton, 1996; second edition, 2005), Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Toni Morrison (ed. with Kathryn Earle, MLA Publications, 1997), Toni Morrison's Beloved: A Casebook (ed. with William L. Andrews, Oxford University Press, 1999), Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, a slave narrative by Harriet Jacobs (Norton Critical Edition co-edited with Frances Smith Foster), 2001),

Quotations On the Norton Anthology: "Never again will anybody anywhere not be able to know about the existence of the African-American literature tradition. This is a bible, as far as I'm concerned." "There is nothing mystical about African American literature that makes it the sole property of people of African descent."