Randall Kenan

In 2007 Kenan published The Fire This Time, a book whose title was taken from James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time. It is a work of nonfiction.

In 1993, Kenan published a young adult biography of gay African American novelist and essayist James Baldwin. Kenan has frequently stated that Baldwin is one of his idols. He then spent several years traveling across America and Canada collecting oral histories of African Americans, which he published in Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century (1999).

He was hired at Random House originally because the company "had gotten into trouble with the Equal Opportunity Commission" and they wanted to increase the number of minorities they had working at the company.  After doing odd jobs at Random House, Kenan was able to secure a job at Alfred A. Knopf as a receptionist, where he had opportunities to study his craft.  Kenan worked at Knopf for only two months before he was promoted to assistant to the executive vice president, where he remained in that position for five years. While in the assistant position, until 1989, Kenan had the opportunity to edit dozens of books, which helped him improve in his own craft of storytelling. The experience working at Knopf helped Kenan in finalizing what would become his first published novel, A Visitation of Spirits, in 1992.

Kenan's first novel, A Visitation of Spirits, was published in 1989. While a few critics praised the book, it did not receive much attention, but this changed with the publication in 1992 of Kenan's second book, a collection of short stories titled Let the Dead Bury Their Dead. The stories, based in the fictional community of Tims Creek, focused on (among other things) what it meant to be poor, black, and gay in the southern United States. The book was hailed as a revival of classic southern literature and was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was named a New York Times Notable Book. The short story collection also brought renewed attention to his first novel, which was likewise set in Tims Creek.

Kenan attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, beginning in the fall of 1981 and he graduated in 1985 with degrees in English and Creative Writing. In his freshman year of college Kenan was pursuing a physics degree, but found himself confused on what to pursue because he was not enjoying his classes. He then decided to enroll in a writing class lead by Max Steele, who is an editor for The Paris Review. Kenan also studied with the author Doris Betts who tried to get Kenan a job in publishing in New York city. Despite Doris Betts efforts, Kenan did not get a job in New York right away, and it was not until a few months after graduation that Kenan received an offer to work for the publication company Random House in New York City.

Randall Kenan is an American author who was born March 12, 1963 in Brooklyn, New York. At only six weeks old, Kenan moved to Duplin County, a small rural community in North Carolina, where he lived with his grandparents in a small town named Wallace. The setting of many of Kenan's novels are centered around his homeland of North Carolina. The focus of much of Kenan's work centers around on what it means to be black and gay in the southern United States. Some of Kenan's most notable works include the collection of short stories Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, named a New York Times Notable Book in 1992, A Visitation of Spirits, and The Fire This Time. Kenan is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award and the John Dos Passos Prize.