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He and Rob Pike have written a few books together, that's likely the main connection.

I follow the Go community fairly closely and hadn't heard of Kernighan in connection with Go, but he may also not be advertising his use of it.

He authored the first 4 commits in the Go repository ;)

kernighan also wrote the tutorial on the Limbo programming language:

he's obviously good at it, and the perspective of someone not involved with the creation of the language is a bonus.