Phenomenal San Diego women: Creators and performers

Sept. 27, 2020 5 AM PT

The San Diego Union-Tribune and the Women’s Museum of California are celebrating a century of female achievement in San Diego to mark the 100th year of women’s suffrage in America.

The fifth installment of this series pays tribute to women in the arts — the creators and performers who have fed the imagination, challenged assumptions, entertained, enlightened and enlivened the world around them.

Rae Armantrout

It’s been 14 years since Rae Armantrout was diagnosed with adrenal cortical cancer, a rare and often fatal disease, but she is still going strong. Her latest collection of poetry, “Conjure,” was published this year and is her ninth book this decade. She has been in the national spotlight since “Versed,” the 10th book of her career, won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award. Now a Washington state resident, Armantrout taught literature for more than 20 years at UC San Diego, where she was the longtime director of the New Writing Series. A 2008 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry, she grew up in Allied Gardens and attended Hoover High School. Her poetry, carefully crafted but down to earth, has been inspired by everything from the joys and tragedies of life to physics, economic issues and — in “Versed” — the cancer she ultimately defeated. “The role of art,” Armantrout told the Union-Tribune in 2004, “is to take us a little beyond what we’re familiar with, to stretch that area of what we’re comfortable with. To make us think twice.”

Belle Baranceanu

By the time Belle Baranceanu moved to San Diego in 1933 in her early 30s, she’d already lived a life filled with many loves — won and lost. In 1924, she graduated from college while pursuing her first love: art. At the Minneapolis School of Art, she continued her studies and worked toward a post-graduate degree. There, she found another love: Anthony Angarola, the Italian American painter and art professor who became a major influence on Baranceanu. Her father did not approve of her relationship, but Baranceanu continued to see Angarola, even following him to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1925. They eventually got engaged, but before they could marry, Angarola died at the age of 36 from injuries he sustained in a car accident in France. After her fiancé’s death, Baranceanu began a productive artistic life, with her painting “Wabash Avenue Bridge” capturing the Clyde M. Carr landscape prize at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1931. She moved back to San Diego in 1933 and soon became active in government-sponsored art programs aimed at keeping artists employed during the Great Depression. She created many murals for the California Pacific International Exposition in 1935-36 and eventually produced murals for the La Jolla Post Office, Roosevelt Junior and La Jolla Senior high schools. Baranceanu, who died in La Jolla in 1988, once said: “In everything there is beauty.” In Baranceanu’s world, she often was the woman behind it.

Annette Bening

In her speech to Mesa College’s class of 2002, Mesa alum Annette Bening urged the graduates to “follow what you love in life.” They were words of wisdom from a passion expert. Bening, who moved to San Diego from Kansas at the age of 7, grew up in Del Cerro and fell in love with theater at Patrick Henry High School. Ten years after her 1977 debut at the Old Globe Theatre, Bening was nominated for a Tony Award for her leading role in “Coastal Disturbances.” She received the first of her four Oscar nominations in 1991 for playing a crafty con woman in “The Grifters,” going on to play fierce, formidable characters in such films as “Bugsy” (where she met future husband Warren Beatty), “The Kids Are All Right,” and “20th Century Women.” Bening has also been a generous champion of theater and education in San Diego, donating $40,000 to help build the Patrick Henry Arts, Media and Entertainment Center and headlining a 2018 gala for the San Diego Community College District’s San Diego Promise aid program. Last year, Bening appeared in the mega-hit film “Captain Marvel,” where she played a character with the most perfect name ever: Supreme Intelligence.

Jeannie Cheatham

The San Diego music scene was enriched from the moment Jeannie Cheatham arrived here in 1977 until her retirement from performing more than 30 years later. As the ebullient singer and pianist in The Sweet Baby Blues Band — which she co-led with her husband, trombonist and UC San Diego music professor Jimmy Cheatham — Jeannie recorded eight acclaimed albums for Concord Records. The brassy group performed in San Diego and around the world, from the Hollywood Bowl to Holland’s North Sea Jazz Festival. The Cheathams’ rollicking weekly Sunday jam sessions at various San Diego locales featured area musicians and international stars side by side as Jeannie ably led the proceedings. “I don’t like anybody putting me in a category,” she told the Union-Tribune in 2006. Accordingly, her musical collaborators have ranged from such blues and rock pioneers as T-Bone Walker and Bo Diddley to jazz sax star Illinois Jacquet and pop crooner Johnny Ray. Jeannie’s film-worthy autobiography, “Meet Me With Your Black Drawers On,” was published by University of Texas Press in 2006.

Andra Day

Versatile singer Andra Day has thrived since graduating from San Diego’s School of Creative & Performing Arts in 2003 and becoming a protégé of Stevie Wonder. She grew up singing at Chula Vista’s First United Methodist Church and worked various day jobs, including a Union-Tribune paper route in Point Loma at 19. Day’s 2015 Warner Bros. debut album, “Cheers to the Fall,” earned two Grammy nominations, and she gave a show-stealing 2016 Grammys telecast performance. Her inspirational “Rise Up” was a theme song for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and was featured in the CNN documentary “We Will Rise: Michelle Obama’s Mission to Educate Girls Around the World.” At the 2018 Oscars, Day and Common performed the civil rights-inspired song of empowerment, “Stand for Something,” from the film “Marshall.” Her next album, she told the Union-Tribune, “will talk a lot more about my life growing up in San Diego and building my character.” In the meantime, she is donating her proceeds from her latest single, “Make Your Troubles Go Away,” to GiveDirectly, which provides assistance to low-income families affected by COVID-19 in the U.S. and Africa.

Thelma Virata de Castro

In her purse, Thelma Virata de Castro carries a journal — “so I can always take notes,” she said in 2018 when she was named a recipient of a San Diego Foundation Creative Catalyst Program grant. “I love hearing people’s stories and transforming them into plays,” said the Filipino American playwright. Her world is filled with stories that shine a light on underserved communities, from immigrants to incarcerated individuals. “Theater is about connection,” said de Castro, founder of San Diego Playwrights. “I can’t be a playwright all by myself in my living room.” Her work — part of the Asian American Women Playwrights Archive at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst — is a testament to her devotion to the arts and theater in particular. When asked about the most challenging part of playwriting, she replied: “The actual writing is the hardest part. ... I must love it, though, because I’ve been doing it for a long time.”

Niki de Saint Phalle

French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle created a stunning sculptural world of magical beasts and towering totems, and San Diegans are lucky enough to live in it. A feminist artist who began painting in the early 1960s, de Saint Phalle is best known for massive, brilliantly colored sculptures of balloon-shaped earth mother figures and fanciful animals. In 1983, her 14-foot “Sun God” sculpture took up residency on the UC San Diego campus, where it inaugurated the prestigious Stuart Collection of site-specific works and inspired the university’s annual Sun God Festival. De Saint Phalle moved to La Jolla in 1993, and her whimsical structures currently grace the grounds of the San Diego Convention Center, the Arts District at Liberty Station and the San Diego Waterfront Park. De Saint Phalle died in 2002, one year before the completion of “Queen Califia’s Magical Circle,” a wondrous Niki de Saint Phalle sculpture garden tucked into the corner of Kit Carson Park in Escondido.

Makeda Dread

The woman many San Diegans know as Makeda Dread grew up in Linda Vista, but her heart knows no borders. In the early 1970s, Makeda Cheatom opened The Prophet, a pioneering gourmet vegetarian restaurant whose clientele included George Harrison. She presented her first local reggae concert in 1980, and went on to launch the Bob Marley Day Festival & Tribute to Reggae Legends Concert, which had its 39th edition earlier this year. She hosted the iconic “Reggae Makossa” radio show on 91X for 25 years, and in 1993, she brought her love of global music, art and culture all together at the WorldBeat Cultural Center. The nonprofit center, now housed in a vibrantly painted converted water tank in Balboa Park, hosts art exhibits, poetry readings and music festivals, and provides workshops in dance, drumming and yoga. Cheatom has called the center “a world within a building,” and she keeps it spinning.

Herminia Acosta Enrique

Herminia Acosta Enrique (Techitzin) was a preserver of tradition, a champion of the arts, and the woman who helped elevate the songs, dances, stories and traditions of Mexico to the place of honor they deserve in San Diego and beyond. Enrique is best known for founding San Diego’s Ballet Folklórico en Aztlan in 1967, bringing the spirit of Indigenous dance and culture to students of all ages and audiences of all stripes. She was also a co-founder of the Centro Cultural de la Raza, which has been nurturing and celebrating Chicano, Latino and Indigenous life, art and community for nearly 50 years. Enrique shared her expertise in Mexican folktales and storytelling with the Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, taught folkloric dance in San Diego State University’s Chicano Studies Program, and lectured on rituals and storytelling throughout the country. Enrique was inducted into the San Diego County Women’s Hall of Fame in 2004. She died in 2009, but the Ballet Folklórico en Aztlan continues on, with Enrique’s daughter Viviana Enrique Acosta as its artistic director.

Rosie Flores

Rosie Flores’ self-titled 1987 debut solo album made her the first Latina to hit the national Billboard charts in country music. She was still in her teens in the 1960s when she co-founded Penelope’s Children, San Diego’s first all-female rock band. Her career is still going strong, as evidenced by her arresting 2019 album, “Simple Case of the Blues.” Flores was a vibrant musical mainstay here as the leader of Rosie & The Screamers in the 1970s and early 1980s, after which she co-founded Screamin’ Sirens, a pioneering, all-female, cow-punk band in Los Angeles. Her 1995 album “Rockabilly Filly” helped revive the careers of fellow singers Wanda Jackson and Janis Martin. Flores, now a Texas resident, was voted into the Austin Music Hall of Fame in 2006. She has recently been performing livestreamed concerts from her home.

Faiya Fredman

The quest to explore new creative vistas was a constant for Faiya Fredman, whose work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Getty Center in Los Angeles and virtually every major museum in San Diego. One of the first women to have an exhibition at The Art Center in La Jolla (now the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego), Fredman embraced a forward-looking aesthetic throughout her six-decade career. Her mixed-media paintings and large-scale sculptures focused as easily on the natural world and seascapes as on archaeology and mythology. Fredman, considered by many as the matriarch of San Diego’s contemporary art scene, also incorporated her photos of found objects — such as wilted flowers, leaves and bits of printed text — which she scanned and then had digitally manipulated on a 3-D printer. “Every time I come up with a new idea, that’s my favorite,” Fredman told the La Jolla Light in 2015. She was 94 when she died here of natural causes on Feb. 4.

Jean Isaacs

Jean Isaacs brings dance to the people. After moving to San Diego from Boston in 1970, the award-winning choreographer taught in the Department of Theatre and Dance at UC San Diego for 25 years, and co-founded multiple dance companies, including the San Diego Dance Theater, where she is the company’s artistic director. She has created pioneering projects through the Festival of Mexican Contemporary Dance at SDSU and the eclectic Live Arts Fest. Isaacs also crafted dances for the San Diego Opera, the Old Globe Theatre, the San Diego Repertory Theatre and the La Jolla Playhouse. Isaacs is best known for her boundary-busting Trolley Dances project, the annual site-specific event that has staged dances in swimming pools, grocery stores, libraries and a school that serves homeless children. For the woman known as “San Diego’s grande dame of contemporary dance,” any space can be a stage, and there is room in her audience for everyone.

Jewel Kilcher

She wasn’t from here, but Jewel Kilcher helped put us on the map. In 1995, Atlantic Records released “Pieces of You,” the debut album from the Utah-born, Alaska-raised singer/songwriter who went from singing in San Diego coffeehouses to being on a first-name basis with the planet. That album went on to sell 12 million copies in the U.S., and the local singer/songwriter scene got a big moment in the spotlight that benefited such San Diego standouts as Steve Poltz, Gregory Page, Lisa Sanders and Jason Mraz. Jewel went on to perform at the Vatican and write two memoirs, including “Never Broken — Songs Are Only Half the Story,” which dealt with her abusive father and her period of homelessness in San Diego. In 2016, Jewel launched Never Broken, a website dedicated to emotional fitness. Never Broken has partnered with the Inspiring Children Foundation to provide at-risk youth and families with housing, food, clothing and other life essentials.

Yolanda Lopez

A San Diego native who was raised in Logan Heights, Yolanda Lopez has earned international acclaim for her paintings, drawings, installations, video work and collages. Lopez, who has lectured at UC San Diego and UC Berkeley, uses her art to chronicle and comment on Chicano culture, Chicano women (particularly in the working class), Chicano mythology and more. Her vivid work, which has utilized newspaper clippings, cereal boxes and even a plastic toy called “Taco Terror,” is infused with a keen eye for politics, history, feminism and social inequities. One of Lopez’s best-known pieces, which she created in 1978, shows an Aztec man accusingly pointing his finger, Uncle Sam-like, and asking: “Who’s the illegal alien, Pilgrim?” A pioneer of contemporary Mexican-American art, she has consistently sought to provoke thought and counter ethnic stereotypes. “It is important for us to be visually literate,” Lopez said in a 2011 interview. “It is a survival skill.”

Maxine Mahon

You can say Maxine Mahon’s foray into the world of ballet never would have been if it weren’t for a water-skiing accident in Mission Bay. Mahon, long considered the doyenne of San Diego’s ballet community, started California Ballet Company more than 50 years ago. But that wouldn’t have happened had it not been for that accident, which resulted in a broken clavicle and ribs. Her injuries took her away from the accordion for 18 months and changed the trajectory of her life and career — away from music and toward dance. What resulted was a lifelong love affair with ballet, first performing with San Diego Ballet, the first serious classical dance company in town, which was formed in 1961. Her journey took her from San Diego to Washington, D.C. In 1968, she came back home to San Diego, where she recruited vacationing dancer friends to perform at an outdoor theater at San Diego State University. The performances got great reviews, but there was one problem: When she and her husband, Robert, added up the expenses at their dining room table, the bill came as a shocker: $16,000. “My husband looked at me and said, ‘OK, you have to start teaching.’” That’s how California Ballet Company — San Diego’s oldest professional dance organization — came to be. Never intended, perhaps even accidental.

Alessandra Moctezuma

If it weren’t for some sage advice from her father — Mexican filmmaker Juan Lopez Moctezuma — Alessandra Moctezuma’s life might not have anything to do with art. She wanted to follow in his footsteps, but “my father convinced me to stay in art,” she said in a 2010 Union-Tribune interview. There was, in her father’s advice, a kernel of something appealing. At Santa Monica City College, she enrolled as an art major. From there, she moved on to the University of California Los Angeles. Since 2001, Moctezuma has had an impact on the visual art landscape in San Diego — as gallery director and head of Museum/Gallery Studies at Mesa College. Besides curating exhibitions, she’s had her hand in identifying and showcasing emerging visual talent. And as a professor, her influence is even greater, helping nurture today’s students into tomorrow’s artists. These days, Moctezuma is as busy as ever, teaching a new generation of artists. But more importantly, “bringing artists and communities together.”

Susan Narucki

Grammy Award-winning soprano and UC San Diego music professor Susan Narucki is equal parts musician and social activist. Appointed UCSD’s director of art and community engagement in 2019, she champions timely causes with as much passion as she sings about them. In 2013, Narucki commissioned the chamber opera “Cuatro Corridos,” which chronicles the trafficking of women across the U.S.-Mexico border. It earned a Latin Grammy Award nomination. The second chamber opera she commissioned in this decade, 2018’s “Inheritance,” deals with gun violence. “As artists, we use our voices to address issues in the hope we create dialogue,” Narucki said in a 2017 Union-Tribune interview. She has more than 50 albums to her credit and won a 2000 Grammy as a featured performer on composer George Crumb’s “Star-Child” album. Narucki was a 2020 Best Classical Solo Vocal Album Grammy nominee for “The Edge of Silence — Works For Voice By György Kurtág,” on which she sings in German, Hungarian and Russian.

Edythe Pirazzini

In an appreciation he wrote in 2011, after news broke of Edythe Pirazzini’s passing, longtime Union-Tribune arts critic Welton Jones summed up her impact on the local theater scene: “She was a keystone in San Diego’s evolution into a major theater center, a bridge from the amateur past to the professional present.” Pirazzini, whom Jones credited for shaping San Diego theater, passed away on Feb. 20, 2011, at the age of 96. Pirazzini’s thumbprint on local theater can be traced back to 1957 when she opened the Mission Valley Playhouse “in a barn still smelling like a barn,” observed Jones, who covered theater and the arts from 1966 to 2001. In 1962, construction of the Hanalei Hotel displaced Pirazzini’s Mission Valley Playhouse, forcing her to move to Old Town, where she opened the 74-seat Mission Playhouse. In 1986, when her Mission Playhouse reopened after a four-year hiatus, the Los Angeles Times wrote of her determination: “Pirazzini is the kind of woman who would never do anything without being sure why she was doing it. When, at 17, she strode into NBC studios in New York and asked to speak to the president, she knew exactly why she was there.” Years later, she brought the same kind of enthusiasm to local stages. “Theater is the only medium that I know of where I can express some of the things that I find that I want to share,” she once said.

Zandra Rhodes

You will know her by her hot-pink hair, but you will remember Dame Zandra Rhodes for the red-hot fashion trail she has been blazing for more than 50 years. Since the 1970s, the British-born fashion and textile designer has made bold fashion statements with iconoclastic designs that mix punk rebellion, hippie-chic spirit and haute-coutre structure into clothes that are part fashionista, part rock star and all Zandra. The longtime Del Mar resident has dressed everyone from Princess Diana and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to Freddie Mercury of Queen. Along with her late partner, film executive Salah M. Hassanein, Rhodes has also devoted herself to philanthropy, supporting such local causes as the Arc of San Diego, the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute and the Rancho Coastal Humane Society. Her book “Zandra Rhodes: 50 Fabulous Years in Fashion” was published in 2019 by Yale University Press.

Lilian J. Rice

Lilian J. Rice was a product of San Diego, and San Diego is a product of Lilian J. Rice. Born in National City in 1889, Rice was one of the first women to graduate from UC Berkeley’s architecture program. In 1922, Rice was chosen to create and oversee the development plan for the brand-new community of Rancho Santa Fe. Her understated vision of graceful, rancho-style homes, hotels and public buildings with arched doorways, forged-iron accents and beautifully tiled courtyards and patios celebrated Southern California’s indoor-outdoor lifestyle while helping to establish Spanish Colonial Revival as the state’s signature architectural style. Rice’s many noteworthy structures include the Inn at Rancho Santa Fe and the ZLAC Rowing Club boathouse on Mission Bay. She lived in Rancho Santa Fe until she died of ovarian cancer in 1938. Her legacy will be part of our landscape forever.

Marion Ross

Long before she became part of our TV lives as the cheery Mrs. Cunningham in “Happy Days,” Marion Ross was a San Diego State student playing an English maid in a play at the Old Globe Theatre. Her friendship with Old Globe founding director Craig Noel led to a role at the Pasadena Playhouse, which led to a contract with Paramount Pictures and a TV career that began in the late 1950s and has included stints on “Life With Father,” “Mannix,” and much later, “Gilmore Girls” and “SpongeBob SquarePants.” Her role as the unflappable “Mrs. C” made her forever famous, but she has always kept San Diego close. She was named an Old Globe associate artist in 1982 and returned to the Globe for a 2000 production of the comedy “Over the River and Through the Woods.” The part-time Cardiff resident will be 92 on Oct. 25. Here’s hoping someone bakes Mrs. C one heck of a cake.

Anoushka Shankar

Sitar prodigy Anoushka Shankar was a 10th grader at San Dieguito Academy in Encinitas when she made her Carnegie Hall concert debut in 1996 with her father, iconic Indian composer and sitar master Ravi Shankar. Four years later, when she was 19, the London-born Anoushka recorded “Live at Carnegie Hall” and earned the first of her six Grammy nominations as a solo artist. She and her famed father performed together until his death in 2012. In the years since then, she has toured the world multiple times and recorded with such varied artists as Patti Smith, Herbie Hancock, Lenny Kravitz, Cuban jazz piano great Chucho Valdés, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Sting and Mexican guitar duo Rodrigo y Gabriela. “It’s not just about ‘East meets West’ anymore,” Shankar, a mother of two boys, told the Union-Tribune in 2016. “It’s about a new level of integration.”

Lynn Schuette

With no fanfare or fuss, Lynn Schuette began to change San Diego’s cultural landscape with the 1980 opening of Sushi. Her downtown performance art gallery, which she ran until 1996, featured an array of proudly edgy, genre-blurring artists at the only venue in town daring enough to book them. A skilled visual artist and poet herself, Schuette was fearless as a curator. She had an almost unerring ability to find and showcase singular talents from near and far before they became nationally celebrated. Artists to appear here under the auspices of Sushi included future MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” recipient Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Diamanda Galas, Eric Bogosian, Culture Clash, Whoopi Goldberg, Karen Finley, Donald Byrd and theater director Bartlett Sher, who would go on to win a Tony Award in 2006.

Sylvia M’Lafi Thompson

On stage and off, Sylvia M’Lafi Thompson has been a standout in numerous roles. A Chicago native who moved to San Diego in 1983, she is equally skilled as an actress, playwright, narrator for PBS documentaries, a consultant and as a tireless arts and culture champion and administrator. Her first theater role in San Diego was as the wife of a White detective in Agatha Christie’s “The Mousetrap” at the Fiesta Dinner Theater. When some attendees complained about the casting of Thompson, she responded: “All I could think is: ‘Don’t they know Black people live in England, too?’” Voted 2015 Actor of the Year by the San Diego Theatre Critics Circle, Thompson commanded the stage whether playing roles in “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” at the Old Globe, Moxie Theatre’s wryly apocalyptic “Dog Act” or Shakespeare’s Othello in a 2002 Women’s Repertory Theatre production. “This is what I do. This is what I know. This is what I love,” she told the Union-Tribune in 2016. Offstage, Thompson has been a resident artist at UC San Diego’s Thurgood Marshall College, a cultural affairs coordinator at the San Diego Community College District’s Educational Cultural Center and twice served on the San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture, which she helped launch.

Raquel Welch

The world wouldn’t come to know her as Raquel Welch until the mid-1960s, when a Hollywood agent urged her to use the last name she acquired from her marriage to her first husband, James Welch, in 1959. Before that, she was known as Jo Raquel Tejada, born in Chicago in 1940, the first child of Bolivia-born Armando Carlos Tejada Urquizo and American Josephine Sarah Hall. When she was 2, her family moved from Illinois to San Diego, where a young Raquel fell in love with performing. While a student at La Jolla High School, she nabbed a few beauty pageant crowns, including Miss La Jolla, Miss San Diego and, at the San Diego County Fair, “Fairest of the Fair.” She pursued acting, enrolling in 1958 at San Diego State University on a theater scholarship. The next year, she married Welch, her high school sweetheart. She landed acting roles in local theater productions, followed by a weather forecasting job at KFMB. She got divorced and moved with her children to Dallas, but acting beckoned. In 1963, she moved her family back to the West Coast, this time to Los Angeles. She began applying for movie roles, using Raquel Welch as her stage name. She landed parts, both in movies and on television. Executives thought her first name was hard to pronounce, so they floated a new name: Debbie. She refused. In 1966, she landed her first major role in the science-fiction film “Fantastic Voyage.” She got top billing alongside co-star Stephen Boyd, and the film made Raquel Welch a star. But it was her next film — 1966’s “One Million Years B.C.” — that would change the trajectory of her career, turning her into a sex symbol and pop-culture icon. She had three lines in the film, where she wore a fur bikini. She acted in many more films, and in 1974, she earned a Golden Globe for “The Three Musketeers.” In 2001, the Imagen Foundation awarded her a Lifetime Achievement Award for the positive impact she’s made as an American of Latin heritage. Of her heritage, Welch, now 80, once said: “Latinos are here to stay. As citizen Raquel, I’m proud to be Latina.”

Sherley Anne Williams

Sherley Anne Williams’ first book of poetry, 1975’s “The Peacock Poems,” was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Her first and only novel, 1986’s “Dessa Rose,” was a critical and commercial smash that was later transformed into an off-Broadway musical. And her first children’s book, 1992’s “Working Cotton,” won an American Library Association Caldecott Award. When Williams wrote, she made literary magic. And when she joined the UC San Diego literature department in 1973, the woman who grew up picking crops in Fresno made history by introducing African American literature to the university and to the many students whose horizons were expanded through her deep knowledge and boundless enthusiasm. Williams died of cancer in 1999 at the age of 54. “She had a joie de vivre, a deep, throaty laugh,” literary agent Sandra Dijkstra told the Union-Tribune at the time of Williams’ death. “But it was the laugh of somebody who knew the dark side. She lived the blues, in a way.”