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, Louisiana, in 1993, her M.A. in 1995 from Howard University, and her Ph.D. in African American Literature from Howard University in 1999. As a recipient of the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Scholar award, 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. Dean Williams was nominated by President Barack Obama in 2016 to serve on the National Humanities Council. 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: 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 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 Language 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.