Nellie Yvonne McKay (1930-2006)

McKay’s book review in Signs in Winter 1988 (Vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 344–47), discussing then-recent texts on the lives of black women in the United States, evinces her scholarship on African American Women’s literature and anticipates her contributions to American literature more generally. Farah Jasmine Griffin dedicated her recently published review essay on black feminist literary criticism in Signs (Vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 483–507), titled “That the Mothers May Soar and the Daughters May Know Their Names: A Retrospective of Black Feminist Literary Criticism,” to McKay. Griffin’s review essay positions McKay’s work, specifically her articles “Reflections on Black Women Writers: Revising the Literary Canon” (1987) and “Literature and Politics: Black Feminist Scholars Reshaping Literary Education in the White University, 1970–1986” (1990), as a central animating force for the entire field of black feminist literary criticism.

Nellie Yvonne McKay died January 22, 2006.