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Randall Kenan

Goodreads author profile

born

March 12, 1963 in The United States

gender

male

genre

Literature & Fiction, Nonfiction

member since

August 2007

About this author

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Randall Kenan's 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. 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 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. His latest b...more Randall Kenan's 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. 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 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. His latest book, The Fire This Time, was published in May 2007. He is currently working on a novel, There’s A Man Going Round Taking Names, set in North Carolina and New York City; and a book about the North Carolina hog industry.

He 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 Edourd Morot-Sir Visiting Professor of Creating 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.

He is 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.

Currently he is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill.
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Books by Randall Kenan

Average rating: 4.00 · 456 ratings · 62 reviews · 12 distinct works

	Let the Dead Bury Their Dead 4.16 avg rating — 165 ratings — published 1993 — 4 editions	My rating:
	A Visitation of Spirits: A Novel 3.70 avg rating — 137 ratings — published 1989 — 4 editions	My rating:
	The Fire This Time 4.11 avg rating — 18 ratings — published 2007 — 2 editions	My rating:
	Walking On Water: Black American Lives At The Turn Of The Twenty First Century 3.80 avg rating — 15 ratings — 3 editions	My rating:
	Twenty-Seven Views of Hillsborough by Randall Kenan (Goodreads Author), Michael Malone (Goodreads Author) 3.25 avg rating — 8 ratings — published 2010 — 2 editions	My rating:
	James Baldwin:American Writer, lives of notable gay men and lesbians by Randall Kenan (Goodreads Author), Martin Duberman 3.00 avg rating — 1 rating — published 1994 — 7 editions	My rating:
	The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings by James Baldwin, Randall Kenan (Goodreads Author) (Introduction) 4.26 avg rating — 61 ratings — published 2010 — 4 editions	My rating:
	The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois, Randall Kenan (Goodreads Author) (Introduction) 4.08 avg rating — 5,163 ratings — published 1903 — 145 editions	My rating:
	Go the Way Your Blood Beats: An Anthology of Lesbian and Gay Literary Fiction by African-American Writers by Shawn Stewart Ruff (Goodreads Author) (editor), Carl Hancock Rux (contributor), Toni Morrison (contributor) 4.14 avg rating — 21 ratings — 2 editions	My rating:
	The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois, Randall Kenan (Goodreads Author) (Introduction) 4.67 avg rating — 3 ratings — published 2012	My rating:

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