author portrait

William Melvin Kelley

WILLIAM MELVIN KELLEY was born in New York City in 1937 and attended the Fieldston School and Harvard. The author of four novels and a short story collection, he was a writer in residence at the State University of New York at Geneseo and taught at The New School and Sarah Lawrence College. He was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for lifetime achievement and the Dana Reed Prize for creative writing. He died in 2017.

Books

Reading A DROP OF PATIENCE Through a Blind-Culture Lens

Written by By M. Leona Godin, author of There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness In William Melvin Kelley’s A Drop of Patience, we follow the life of a young Black musician named Ludlow Washington, who is placed in a school for the blind when he is five and remains there until

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William Melvin Kelley is awarded the American Book Award for DUNFORDS TRAVELS EVERYWHERES

William Melvin Kelley and illustrator Aiki Kelley are being awarded the American Book Award for Dunfords Travels Everywheres, a Joycean, Rabelaisian romp in which he brings back some of his most memorable characters in a novel of three intertwining stories.   “Among the most innovative and exciting novelists in the history of international literature, the

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