Randall Kenan

Randall Kenan is an acclaimed author of fiction and nonfiction born in Brooklyn, New York. After he graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Kenan worked for several years on the editorial staff of the publishing house, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. His first novel, A Visitation of Spirits, was published in 1989. His collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, was published in 1993 and hailed by The New York Times as “nothing short of a wonder-book: one of those striking literary anomalies, in the tradition of “Raintree County” and “The Country of the Pointed Firs,” that are nearly as difficult to classify as they are enjoyable to read and reread.” That collection was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was among The New York Times Notable Books of 1992. Kenan is also the author of a young adult biography of James Baldwin (1993), and wrote the text for Norman Mauskoff’s book of photographs, A Time Not Here: The Mississippi Delta (1997). Other publications include Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (2000) and The Fire this Time (2007), a work of nonfiction. He has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University, Duke University, the University of Mississippi at Oxford, and Vassar College. His many awards and honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, and the Rome Prize. He was awarded the North Carolina Award for Literature in 2005. He is currently a professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.