John E. Williams is a professor of English and African American Studies at Lane Community College in Eugene, OR. He is the recipient of the Edward Albee Foundation Award for Creative Artists, and has published reviews, scholarly essays, and articles in journals such as Afterimage, Discourse, Motion Picture, The Independent, A Critique of America, Sage, Critical Social Issues, The African American Review, and The Black Scholar. He has coordinated workshops, festivals, and multimedia film and video instillations for such institutions as the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Nosotros, the Northern California Women in Film and Television, and the Cascade Festival of African Films. He has published articles on Black feminism, Black francophone women writers, and Black writers in the United States, United Kingdom, Africa, and the Caribbean.

The John Williams collection consists of publicity materials for commercially released films from 1964-1990, such as Cool World (1964), …tick…tick…tick (1970), Ganja and Hess (1973), Scream Blacula Scream (1973), Almacita Di Desoloto (1986), Ethnic Notions (1987), and a poster for To Sleep with Anger (1990) signed by Danny Glover. The collection also includes posters for several of the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame’s annual Oscar Micheaux Awards ceremonies between the years 1980-1992, as well as posters for the 1982 and 1985 Blacklight Film Festival and a 1985 exhibition of Gordon Parks’s photographs. The materials were collected by Williams during his time affiliated with San Francisco Bay Area-based organizations such as There City Cinema, the Northern California Women in Film and Television, and the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in the 1980s and 1990s. The Williams collection also includes research materials and articles Williams wrote about Kathleen Collins.