Randall Kenan

Randall Kenan, born in Brooklyn, New York on March 12, 1963, was an American author known for his works of nonfiction and fiction. Kenan, who was raised in a small, rural community in North Carolina, often explored themes of gay and black identity in the southern United States in his fiction. His first novel, "A Visitation of Spirits," was published by Grove Press in 1989, and a collection of stories, "Let the Dead Bury Their Dead," was published in 1992 by Harcourt, Brace. This collection was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Kenan was 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). "Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century" was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1999, and was nominated for the Southern Book Award. Kenan received a B.A. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1985. From 1985 to 1989, he worked on the editorial staff of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc, publishers. He began teaching writing at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University in 1989. In 1994, Kenan was the first William Blackburn Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University and the Edourd Morot-Sir Visiting Professor of Creating Writing at his alma mater in 1995. He held the Lehman-Brady Professorship at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, and taught urban literature at Vassar College. Kenan was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, the Sherwood Anderson Award, the John Dos Passos Prize, and was the 1997 Rome Prize winner from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Kenan passed away in August 2020, just after his short story collection "If I Had Two Wings" was published.