Janis Faye Kearney (born September 29, 1953) is an American author, lecturer, and publisher. She served as the personal diarist to President Bill Clinton from 1995 to 2001, the first such appointment in U.S. presidential history.
Early Life and Education
Kearney was born in Gould, Arkansas, to Ethel V. Curry Kearney and Thomas James Kearney. She is the 14th of 19 children. Her father was a sharecropper, and her mother was a homemaker who also worked the family's cotton crops. From a young age, Kearney worked in the cotton fields and helped care for her younger siblings. All but one of the Kearney children graduated from college, with many attending institutions including Harvard, Yale, Brown, Vanderbilt, and Stanford.
She graduated from Gould High School in 1971 and earned a B.A. in journalism from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville in 1976. She later completed thirty hours toward a Master of Public Administration from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
Professional Career
Kearney began her professional career with the State of Arkansas in 1978, serving as a program manager for the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act program and later as director of information for the Migrant Student Records Transfer System.
In 1987, she became managing editor of the Arkansas State Press, a historic newspaper owned by civil rights activist Daisy Bates. When Bates retired three months later, Kearney purchased the newspaper. She published the weekly paper for five years.
Clinton Administration
In 1992, Governor Bill Clinton hired Kearney to serve as director of his presidential campaign's Minority Media Outreach effort. After the election, she worked in the Clinton presidential transition office in Little Rock. She then moved to Washington, D.C., where she served as a White House media affairs officer and later as director of public communication for the U.S. Small Business Administration.
In 1995, Kearney was appointed as the first-ever personal diarist to a U.S. president. In this role, she attended meetings, events, and press conferences to document President Clinton's daily activities, creating a living historical record. In 1998, she was subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury investigating the Clinton sex scandal, and her diary was also subpoenaed. No wrongdoing was found. The diary was later transferred to the Clinton Presidential Library.
Later Career and Publications
After leaving the White House in 2001, Kearney moved to Chicago and began a two-year fellowship at the Harvard University W. E. B. Du Bois Institute of African and African American Studies. She later served as a visiting fellow at DePaul University and as Chancellor's Lecturer for Chicago City Colleges.
She founded Writing Our World (WOW) Press in 2004. Her published works include:
- Cotton Field of Dreams (2004) — a personal memoir
- Conversations: William Jefferson Clinton—From Hope to Harlem (2006) — a biography featuring interviews with more than 100 African-American acquaintances and President Clinton
- Once Upon a Time There Was a Girl: A Murder at Mobile Bay (2008) — a novel
- Something to Write Home About: Memories of a Presidential Diarist — a memoir
- Daisy: Between a Rock and a Hard Place (2013) — a biography of Daisy Gatson Bates
- Sundays with TJ: 100 Years of Memories on Varner Road (2014) — a book about her father
Awards and Recognition
Kearney was inducted into the Arkansas Writers Hall of Fame in 2016 and received the University of Arkansas Lemke Journalism Award that same year. In 2014, she co-founded the Celebrate! Maya Project, a nonprofit dedicated to sharing Maya Angelou's life and legacy through arts, literacy, and poetry programs for youth. In 2015, she founded the Read.Write.Share Writers Weekend for emerging writers.
