24 Facts About Randall Kenan

Randall Kenan was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and the John Dos Passos Prize.

Randall Kenan was born in Brooklyn, New York, at six weeks old Kenan moved to Duplin County, North Carolina, a small rural community, where he lived with his grandparents in a town named Wallace.

Randall Kenan recalled the conversation, after which he remained with his great-aunt Mary for the remainder of his adolescent years.

Randall Kenan grew up loving to read everything, ranging from novels to comic books to the Bible, and he eventually developed a love for storytelling.

Randall 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.

Randall Kenan then decided to enroll in a writing class led by Max Steele, an editor for The Paris Review.

Randall Kenan studied with the author Doris Betts, who tried to get Randall Kenan a job in publishing in New York City.

Randall Kenan's efforts were not immediately successful, and it was not until a few months after graduation that Kenan received an offer to work for the book publisher Random House in New York City.

Randall Kenan 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.

Randall 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.

The experience working at Knopf helped Randall Kenan in finalizing what would become his first published novel, A Visitation of Spirits, in 1989.

Randall Kenan taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University, and Vassar College once a week each, which gave him plenty of time to work on his own writing.

Randall Kenan was a full-time professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Randall Kenan served as a visiting writer or writing in residence at a number of other universities, including the University of Mississippi, the University of Memphis, Duke University, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Randall Kenan's work is widely recognized for blending elements of Black Southern life with speculative and supernatural motifs.

Randall Kenan grew up in Chinquapin, North Carolina, where he was deeply immersed in comic books, fairy tales, and science fiction.

Randall Kenan's writing reflects these influences through its engagement with Afrofuturism, magical realism, and popular culture.

Randall Kenan's work is known for exploring queer transformation, historical trauma, and the supernatural as metaphors for societal alienation and personal identity crises.

In 1993, Randall Kenan published a young adult biography of gay African-American novelist and essayist James Baldwin.

Randall Kenan frequently stated that Baldwin was one of his idols.

Randall Kenan then spent several years traveling across the United States 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.

Randall Kenan won a number of writing awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the Sherwood Anderson Award, the John Dos Passos Prize, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In 2007, Randall Kenan published The Fire This Time, a non-fiction book whose title references James Baldwin's 1963 The Fire Next Time.

Randall Kenan died on August 28,2020, at his home in Hillsborough, North Carolina, aged 57.