thumb|right|Emma Dunham Kelley from the frontispiece of Megda 1891.
Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins (November 11, 1863 – October 22, 1938) was an American writer, and author of the novel Four Girls At Cottage City (1895). An earlier novel, Megda (1891), was published under her maiden name of Emma Dunham Kelley and the pseudonym "Forget-me-not." Her father was Isaac Kelley, a sailor; her mother was Gabriella A. (Chase), and she had an older sister and younger half-brother. Kelley-Hawkins married Benjamin A. Hawkins, a civil engineer, in 1982 and had two daughters. Kelley-Hawkins and her work, which focused on themes of religion and gender, fell into obscurity before her death in 1938 as well as many years following. She later rose to prominence following the rediscovery of her works, with many focused on her racial identity.
Biography
On November 11, 1863, in Dennis, Massachusetts, Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins was born the youngest of two children to Isaac Kelley, a sailor, and Gabriella A. (Chase) Kelley. On April 4, 1863, her father alongside her uncles, Johial Chase and Captain Hersey Crowell, were declared dead after disappearing off the coast of Rhode Island. Kelley-Hawkins and her older sister, Alice, were then left under the parentage of their widowed mother.
She and her family remained in Dennis until at least the year 1865, before departing for New Bedford, where they would stay with her aunt, Emily (Chase) Bryant. Not long after, on July 14, 1892, she married a civil engineer, Benjamin Arnon Hawkins. Her body of work consists of two novels: Megda (1891) and Four Girls at Cottage City (1895). A third novel, to be a sequel to Megda, was drafted but never published. Later, in 2006, further genealogical research published indicated that Kelley-Hawkins was, in fact, white or identified herself as white. (National Genealogical Society Quarterly, Volume 94, No. 1, March 2006). Speculation has been made, assuming Kelley-Hawkins may have even descended from Irish immigrants.