photograph by karen pulfer focht
Kelis Rowe (left) and her sister, Adriane Johnson-Williams, grew up in Whitehaven, walking distance from the Levi Public Library. When they weren't in school or at church, they were in the library reading and dreaming. Recently, they both became published authors. "Librarians are demigods, my sister and I both agree on that," Adriane says.
Two sisters from Memphis, both published authors, recently visited their childhood sanctuary in Whitehaven. The home where they grew up was walking distance from the place where they grew wings: the Levi Public Library.
“The last time we were here? Forever ago,” says Dr. Adriane Johnson-Williams, the older sister, as she scans the cozy space where she once read spy thrillers and fantasy novels. The books transported her to distant times and places, and encouraged her to explore and question. “Librarians are demigods; my sister and I both agree on that.”
“It’s so much smaller than I remember,” says Kelis Rowe, four years younger, as she surveys the corner where she once read young-adult novels and literary classics. The books guided her to places deep inside and encouraged her to dream and feel. “Our mom would let us walk here in summer and stay all day. This library was our refuge.”
The two books they wrote represent different genres, but both are products of Black women trying to make sense of the world they were born into, questioned, and challenged. Adriane's book is a self-help book for corporate executives who want to understand the benefits of diversity and racial equity.
Adriane, the explorer, now 50, followed her questions into the academic and business worlds and started her own management consulting firm. Her book, Not Your Father’s Capitalism: What Race Equity Asks of U.S. Business Leaders, was published in 2022. She calls it “a textbook, a guidebook, and a map” to help businesses move toward racial equity.
Kelis, the dreamer, 46, followed her feelings into psychology (her major) and marketing (her first profession), then into her life as a wife, stay-at-home mom, homeschooler, and writer. Her book, Finding Jupiter, a young-adult romance novel about two Black teenagers growing up in Memphis, was also published in 2022.
The two books represent entirely different genres written for entirely different audiences, but both are products of Black women trying to make sense of the world they were born into, questioned and challenged, longed for and, in various ways, found.
Neither book could be found at Levi until their mother, Carolyn Williams, called the branch and requested copies in early May. “When they weren’t in school or in church, they were here,” Williams says. “You’d think their library would have a little display of their work.”
The Memphis library system’s single copy of Finding Jupiter, transferred from the Orange Mound branch, was waiting for Kelis when she arrived. She shelved the book herself between young-adult novels by Veronica Roth and J.K. Rowling, creator of the Harry Potter series. “Now my book is next to those. It’s surreal,” says Kelis.
Kelis’ book is a young adult novel about two Black teenagers growing up in Memphis and their budding romance.
The library system didn’t have a copy of Adriane’s book, but she wasn’t surprised. “My book is a business book, a product of my consulting business,” says Adriane, who lives in Memphis with her wife, Trinette. “Kel’s book is a much bigger deal. She does fiction. That’s art, right? That’s a totally different level of writing.”
Kelis, whose given name is Raquel (Kelis Rowe is her pen name), wasn’t surprised by Adriane’s response. “My sister is my biggest cheerleader and I’m her biggest fan,” says Kelis, who lives in Texas with her husband, Billy, and two children, Zack, 16, and Zāli, 3. “I probably worship her too much. My husband jokes about how much validation I need from my sister.”
Both sisters are grateful for the validation they needed and received from their mother. “There’s a running joke in our family,” Kelis says. “Our brother Rodney says Mom brainwashed all of us into believing we could do anything. I guess it worked.”
Adriane was the first believer. As a young teenager, she devoured the spy thrillers written by Robert Ludlum, creator of Jason Bourne. “My second career aspiration was political assassin,” she says with a laugh. “It was an escape, right? If your world is not entirely a safe place, the books become like your little Wonderland. They take you away.”
When she was 14, Adriane took herself away to Foxcroft School, a boarding school in Virginia. She got the idea while watching The Facts of Life, a 1980s sitcom set in a girls’ boarding school. “It was like, wait a minute, what is this place?” Adriane says. “So I asked the librarians about it. To me they were the guardians of all wisdom and knowledge. They gave me a book about boarding schools. I was born with my luggage packed.”
Adriane’s parents took out a second mortgage to pay for the school. “My family just could not afford that kind of thing, but my mom knew how badly I wanted it,” Adriane says. “My mom took me up there on a bus. She stayed there for a week interviewing everybody. She told me years later that if she hadn’t felt good about the place, she was taking me back home.”
“My sister is my biggest cheerleader and I'm her biggest fan.” — Kelis Rowe
At Foxcroft, Adriane was immersed for the first time in a predominantly white, privileged, and academically rigorous environment. The experience challenged her beliefs, assumptions, and abilities. “It was glorious and I never looked back,” Adriane says.
The experience also made her more aware than ever of race- and class-based disparities and inequities in education. “I basically went to a resort school,” she says. “The more I saw what I was experiencing and what my brother and sister in public schools in Memphis were not experiencing, the angrier I got, and the more I kept thinking, ‘What is this? Why is this?’”
The economic disparities between her family and the families of her fellow students at Foxcroft were even harsher. “I started to really think about poverty and wage gaps and all that,” she says. “How is it that you can have two parents working full-time and still be under the poverty line for a family of five?”
Adriane kept following her questions. She earned a bachelor’s degree in economics at Wellesley College, a master’s in education at George Washington University, and a doctorate in educational policy at the University of Wisconsin. She took a job as an education professor at West Virginia University, where she spent four difficult though illuminating years. “Worse than the racism or the sexism I found there was the anti-intellectualism,” she says. “I should have left sooner, but I loved teaching and I loved working with students.”
Adriane returned to Memphis in 2013, intrigued by the merger of city and county schools and other changes in the district she was hearing about from her cousin, Alisha Kiner, who was principal of Booker T. Washington High School when President Barack Obama delivered the commencement address there in 2011. “Adriane has always been my thought partner, even when I was 15 and she was 10,” says Kiner. “She’s so smart. She always has something insightful to say.”
In Memphis, Adriane worked for several local organizations, including Seeding Success, Pyramid Peak Foundation, and LeMoyne-Owen College. In 2019, she started her own management consulting firm, Standpoint Consulting. The name comes from a social theory that examines how an individual’s understanding of the world is shaped by social, political, and economic experiences.
“I have spent more of my life among wealthy white people than I have living among my Black low- and middle-income family,” Adriane writes in her book. “Bridging the gap between whiteness and everything else has given me a distinct perspective on diversity, inclusion, and equity.”
Adriane’s goal is to help corporate leaders understand the benefits of diversity and commit to racial equity. “I don’t use the term DEI because diversity and inclusion are not necessarily associated with equity,” she writes. “You cannot simply hire your way to race equity. You must dismantle all aspects of the systems within your organization that reinforce the inequities within the larger society.”
photograph by karen pulfer focht
Both sisters dedicated their books to their mother, Carolyn Williams, a founding member and Sunday School superintendent at Soul Winners Church in South Memphis. Her faith in them helped them believe in themselves. “Our brother, Rodney, says mom brainwashed all of us into believing we could do anything,” Kelis says. “I guess it worked.”
While Adriane, the pragmatist, left home, Kelis, the empath, stayed in Memphis. “I always had my head in the clouds,” she says, “but my heart was in Memphis.” So was her twin brother, Rodney. “I was introverted and shy, but I was never alone. With Rodney, I always had a best friend.”
And a book. In high school, Kelis was drawn to the free verse of Walt Whitman and the confessional poetry of Sylvia Plath. “I was a brooding teen,” she says. She also was drawn to literary classics about love, race, and class such as Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
“I felt such strong emotions when I read those books — anger, frustration, sorrow,” she says. “I thought, that was fun. Let me find that again. Those books made me a reader for pleasure. I read to feel. They woke me up to empathy.”
“Bridging the cap between whiteness and everything else has given me a distinct perspective on diversity, inclusion, and equity.” — Adriane Johnson Williams
Kelis, like her mother, wanted to be a flight attendant. But, like her mother, she was too tall. After graduating from Central High School in 1995, the 6-foot-2 Kelis earned a degree at Christian Brothers University. There she met and fell in love with an engineering student named Billy from St. Vincent and the Grenadines. They were married and moved to Texas where she worked in market research.
Her life changed forever when their first child, Zack, was born with a tethered spinal cord. Surgery was successful, but before Zack started school, he was diagnosed with sensory processing disorder (SPD). “The regular classroom didn’t work for him, so I decided to homeschool him,” Kelis says. “I put my personal career on hold and kind of disappeared to myself.”
When Zack was 10, Kelis and her husband decided he was ready to go back to school. Kelis was ready to reappear to herself. She made a vision board with a friend; her dreams included staying married, having another child, traveling, and writing a book. “I always was a writer, but I didn’t always want to be a writer,” she says. She began blogging about her experiences as a stay-at-home mom and homeschooler. “I thought I’d be the Black David Sedaris, writing creative nonfiction,” she says.
Instead, she rediscovered young-adult fiction. One book in particular captured her imagination: Calling My Name by Texas author Liara Tamani. The novel is a coming-of-age story about a 12-year-old African-American girl in Houston who finds her voice and purpose. “I looked at the cover, read the first page, and thought to myself, ‘That’s me. I’m her,’” Kelis says. “I was 40 and it was the first time in my life that I actually saw myself in a book.”
Kelis decided to write the book she would have wanted to read as a teenager. She wrote the first draft in the peace and quiet of a nearby library and drew on her own experiences. Finding Jupiter is about a summer romance between two high school students who meet at a roller rink in Memphis. Ray, a tall, confident girl, is a poet and artist home from boarding school. Orion, a charming but shy boy, is a swimmer who lives with sensory processing disorder. The teens fall in love as they bond over shared grief.
The subject and tone of her book was informed by her son’s summer reading list. “Every book on the list about Black people was about some sort of race-based trauma or pain,” Kelis says. “I didn’t want to write another book about Black kids clashing with the police or surviving violence or reckoning with racism. I wanted to write something bright.”
Kelis planned to self-publish the book. Then she entered and won a “Pitch Wars” contest online. J. Elle, a bestselling author of young adult fantasy fiction, became her mentor. With J. Elle’s guidance, Kelis revised her first draft and signed with an agent.
Kelis’ book mixes prose with original “found poetry,” composed with random words found on pages of The Great Gatsby and Their Eyes Were Watching God. It was published by Crown Books for Young Readers.
“Kel has a literary style to her voice and it just melts me,” J. Elle told Pitch Wars.
photograph by karen pulfer focht
The sisters honed their intellects and imaginations at the Levi library. “This library was our refuge,” Kelis says.
Both sisters dedicated their books to their mother. “Mamma, you always made me believe I could be anything. I believed that you believed it. Which made me want to be something amazing,” wrote Kelis, who also dedicated her book to Zack.
Adriane added dedications to her grandmother, her great-grandmother, “and all Black women and daughters of Black women whose wisdom is as valuable as it was hard-earned,” she wrote.
Their mother could not be prouder. “They both were word studiers,” says Carolyn Williams. “My husband [Sylvester, a retired engineering technician], their father, bought them a giant dictionary when they were young. That was their pastime, all three of my kids, reading and studying words.”
“They may not be in church, but it’s in them. They know the scriptures. The Bible says, “Train up a child in the way they should grow.” — Carolyn Williams
When Adriane and Kelis weren’t studying words in school or in the library, they were in church studying The Word. Their mother was a founding member and Sunday School superintendent at Soul Winners Church in South Memphis.
“My wife says I have a Ph.D. in Sunday School,” Adriane says. “But really, I got kicked out of Sunday School class all the time because I kept interrupting with my questions and comments.”
Today, Adriane describes herself as an agnostic, Kelis as unchurched. “They may not be in church but it’s in them,” says their mother. “They know the scriptures. The Bible says, ‘Train up a child in the way they should go.’”
The Williams sisters were raised to find their own ways. “Our generation was mothered,” says Kiner, whose grandmother was Carolyn Williams’ sister. “The women in our family kept us all close, but they didn’t keep us at home. We all were raised to think and do for ourselves.”
The Bible is a collection of books and stories.
Adriane was intrigued by the stories but perplexed by the contradictions she found in them and in how they were applied. “For example, you got the Book of Acts, which is right after Christ dies, and the church is beginning, and women were among the first church leaders and equals,” Adriane says. “So I ask my mom, ‘You know this stuff better than anyone. Why aren’t you a preacher?’ And she says, ‘You know women can’t be preachers.’ I’m like, what? That doesn’t make sense.”
Kelis loved the “the big questions” she found in Bible stories, questions that made her wonder and doubt. “I grew up reading the Bible, being exposed to those big stories, but what about people who grow up in places where the Bible is not their holy book, or not the only holy book?”
In Finding Jupiter, Ray shares her deepest thoughts with her new love, Orion. “I have a theory,” Ray says at one point. “It’s more like a question ... What if we are the stars? ... What if one day, good wins, and there’s no more need for black holes because everything on earth is starlight? Maybe that will be the heaven on earth that the holy books across religions write about. Maybe The One that everyone is waiting for is actually a metaphor for goodness inhabiting the earth, through the stars, through us?”
And through their books.
David Waters, a longtime Memphis journalist, is associate director of the Institute for Public Service Reporting at the University of Memphis.
