William M. Kelley was an African American novelist and short-story writer. He was a writer in residence at the State University of New York at Geneseo and a teacher at the New School and Sarah Lawrence College. He was the winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for lifetime achievement and the Dana Reed Prize for creative writing. He was the author of A Different Drummer. He died in 2017.

Set in a mythical backwater Southern town, A Different Drummer is the extraordinary story of Tucker Caliban, a quiet, determined descendant of an African chief who for no apparent reason destroys his farm and heads for parts unknown--setting off a mass exodus of the state's entire Black population.

Nearly three decades offer its first publication, A Different Drummer remains one of the most trenchant, imaginative, and hard-hitting works of fiction to come out of the bitter struggle for African-American civil rights.