Janis Kearney, Former Clinton Diarist and Noted Author, to Offer Evening of Conversation

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Fulbright College graduate and former personal diarist for President Clinton, Janis Kearney is the author of “Cotton Field of Dreams,” a poignant and vivid portrait of an Arkansas Delta sharecropping family, and how - through hard work and dreams - the impossible became reality. She will offer a public discussion, “A Conversation with Janis Kearney: One Journey, Many Lessons,” at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Feb. 27, in Giffels Auditorium, Old Main.

Afterward, she will sign copies of her book, which will be available for sale. Her talk, which is free and open to the public, is being sponsored by the African American Studies Program and the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas.

In “Cotton Field of Dreams,” Kearney shares her journey from the Arkansas Delta to the West Wing of the White House. Born in Gould, Ark., 72 miles south of Little Rock, she graduated from Gould High School in 1971 and from the University of Arkansas in 1976 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. In 1980, she began work on a master’s degree in public administration at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock.

From 1978 to 1987, she worked for Arkansas state government, three years as a program manager for the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act Program, and six years as director of information for the national headquarters of the Migrant Student Records Transfer System in Little Rock.

She purchased the Arkansas State Press Newspaper in 1987 from the renowned civil rights activist Daisy Bates and published the statewide weekly for five years. During that time, she also served as a board director for the National Newspaper Publishers Association. She was director of minority media outreach for the Clinton-Gore Presidential Campaign headquarters in 1992, and in 1993 joined the Clinton Administration in Washington.

Kearney served briefly in the White House media affairs office before President Clinton appointed her director of public affairs and communications for the U.S. Small Business Administration in 1993.

From 1995 to 2001, she served as President Clinton's personal diarist, a job that entailed chronicling the Clinton presidency day-to-day, the first time in history a President had made such an appointment. In July 2001, she moved to Chicago to join her husband, Bob Nash, Clinton’s former director of presidential personnel and current vice chair for ShoreBank Corp.

Kearney began a fellowship at Harvard's W.E.B. DuBois Institute in Sept. 2001. The DuBois Fellowship supported her work researching and writing “Conversations: William Jefferson Clinton from Hope to Harlem,” an oral history of Clinton's race legacy.

In 2003, she was appointed Chancellor's Lecturer at Chicago City Colleges and was awarded the PUSH for Excellence Award for outstanding contributions in communications. She is currently a visiting fellow at DePaul University, where she is completing an oral historical biography on Clinton's race legacy. Her column, “Politics Is Life,” appears in African American newspapers around the country. She has one son, Darryl, and resides in Chicago with her husband and her two cats, Clio and Shakespeare.