In Memoriam: Kenya Siana Flash, 1980-2021

Kenya Siana Flash, librarian for political science, global information, and government information at the Marx Science and Social Science Library on the campus of Yale University, died late last month after a short illness. She was 41 years old.

A native of Jamaica, she came to the United States with her mother and sibling and settled in Buffalo, New York. She was a graduate of Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, where she majored in government and law. Flash held a master’s degree in political science from East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania and a master’s degree in library science from Drexel University in Philadelphia. Before joining the library staff at Yale in 2017, Flash served as an academic librarian at the University of Tennessee.

Flash once remarked, “as an academic librarian, I work to make myself irrelevant. It is my hope that after I have worked with students they will feel more empowered to engage in their own research with the confidence and diligence of a highly trained researcher.”

“Every time I saw her, she made my day brighter, and I know that was a shared experience for so many of us at the library,” noted Alison Clemens, head of processing in Manuscripts and Archives at Yale. “She was one of the kindest, funniest, clearest-eyed, most dedicated people I’ve had the pleasure of working with. We were fortunate to have her in this world, and I miss her already.”