- Randall Kenan was an American novelist, short story writer, biographer, and educator.
- Kenan’s first novel, A Visitation of Spirits was published by Grove Press in 1989. His collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, was published in 1992 by Harcourt, Brace. That collection was nominated for the 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. He is also the author of a young adult biography of James Baldwin (1993), and wrote the text for Norman Mauskopf’s book of photographs, A Time Not Here: The Mississippi Delta (1997).
- A work of nonfiction, Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century was published by Alfred A. Knopf (1999), and was nominated for the Southern Book Award. The Fire This Time, a non-fiction homage to Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, was published by Melville House (2007). He also edited and wrote the introduction to The Cross of Redemption: The Uncollected Writings of James Baldwin, published by Pantheon (2010).
- Kenan was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1963, and spent his childhood in Chinquapin, North Carolina. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he received a B.A. in English in 1985. From 1985 to 1989 he worked on the editorial staff of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc, publishers. In 1989 he began teaching writing at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University. He was the first William Blackburn Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University in the fall of 1994, and the Edouard Morot-Sir Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at his alma mater in 1995. He was the John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi, Oxford (1997-98), Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Memphis, and held the Lehman-Brady Professorship at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. He has also taught urban literature at Vassar College.
- Kenan is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and recipient of many awards. Read his NY Times Obituary here.
Randall Garrett Kenan (1963 - 2020)
Scholar / Advisor
The James Baldwin Project
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