Praise for Toni at Random
“The more we learn about Toni Morrison, the more in awe we are of her gifts and her incredible range as a writer, intellectual and now we meet her as a literary activist and editor. Dana A. Williams rises to the challenge of documenting the workings of a genius, by demonstrating a mighty brilliance of her own. We have in our hands a masterpiece— a scholarly page turner, dwelling at the intersection of meticulous research, abiding passion, and tremendous respect.” — Tayari Jones, author of American Marriage
Publishers Weekly
Howard University English professor Williams (In the Light of Likeness—Transformed) spotlights Toni Morrison’s efforts to shepherd Black literature into the mainstream in this enthralling chronicle of her tenure as an editor at Random House in the 1960s and ’70s. Drawing on Morrison’s correspondence, Williams assembles rousing stories of her editorial projects that coalesce into a rich portrait of her interests and politics. Her first project at the imprint, a 1972 anthology of African literature, laid the groundwork for her “editorial aesthetic.” She also worked on To Die for the People by Black Panther Party founder Huey P. Newton and The Case for Black Reparations by legal scholar Boris Bittker; championed poets Barbara Chase-Riboud, Lucille Clifton, and June Jordan; and went to bat for transgressive writers like Wesley Brown, Leon Forrest, and John McCluskey. Read more
NPR
Spring is here – the perfect season to sit in the grass and read a book. Or maybe the pollen count is getting to you, in which case it's the perfect season to sit indoors and read a book. Either way, you're going to need a few recommendations. Here are some books coming out in the next few months that caught our attention. Read more
About
Dana A. Williams is Professor of African American Literature in the Department of English and Dean of the Graduate School at Howard University. Dean Williams earned her B.A. in English from Grambling State University in Grambling, LA in 1993, her M.A. in 1995 from Howard University, and her Ph.D. in African American Literature from Howard University in 1998. As a recipient of the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Scholar award in 1999, she was a visiting research fellow at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, where she completed extensive research on her dissertation author Leon Forrest. Before returning to Howard as a faculty member in 2003, Dr. Williams taught at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge for four years. In 2008-09, she was a faculty fellow at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University, and she assumed chairmanship of Howard's department of English in 2009. In 2019, she was named interim dean of the Graduate School, and in 2021, she became the Graduate School's first permanent female dean.
Dr. Williams is the author of Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer's Legendary Editorship (Amistad/Harper Collins, 2025). She is also editor of the following publications: an annotated bibliography, Contemporary African American Female Playwrights: An Annotated Bibliography (Greenwood, 1999), which she completed as her M.A. thesis at Howard; an edited collection of essays August Wilson and Black Aesthetics (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2004) co-edited with Dr. Sandra G. Shannon; African American Humor, Irony, and Satire: Ishmael Reed, Satirically Speaking (Cambridge Scholars, 2007), Conversations with Leon Forrest (UP of Mississippi, 2007), and Contemporary African American Fiction: New Critical Essays (Ohio State UP, 2009). She is the author of the first and only book-length study on Leon Forest, In the Light of Likeness--Transformed: The Literary Art of Leon Forrest (Ohio State UP, 2005).
In addition to her book projects, Dr. Williams has published articles in CLA Journal, African American Review, Bulletin of Bibliography, Langston Hughes Review, Zora Neale Hurston Forum, Studies in American Fiction, International Journal of the Humanities, Profession, and PMLA. She is a past president of the Association of the Departments of English Executive Committee, former chair of the Black American Literature and Culture Forum and former member of the Executive Council for the Modern Languages Association, and past President of the College Language Association--the oldest and largest professional organization for faculty of color who teach languages and literatures. She is immediate past president of the Modern Languages Association and the Toni Morrison Society and currently serves as a board member for the American Council of Learned Societies, the Hurston/Wright Foundation, the Judge Alexander Williams Center at the University of Maryland, and the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University.