Randall Kenan

Randall Kenan was born in Brooklyn, New York on 12th March 1963. At first he was raised by his grandparents before moving to Chinquapin, North Carolina to be looked after by his great-aunt. The community he grew up in here was the basis for his fictional setting of Tims Creek, a location in which all of his later fiction would be set.
He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, graduating in 1985 with degrees in English and Creative Writing and then was hired by Random House in New York City, with the help of one of his instructors and novelist Tony Morrison. He later transferred to the editorial staff of Alfred A Knopf where he stayed until 1989 when he began teaching writing at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University.
His first novel was published in this same year, A Visitation of Spirits, though it did not receive much attention in contrast to his second book in 1992, Let the Dead Bury the Dead, a collection of short stories which focussed on what it meant to be poor, black and gay in the southern USA, based on his own experiences. This also achieved renewed attention in his previous book.
Kenan has spent years travelling across both the USA and Canada to collect the histories of African-Americans, stories which he later published in his book, Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the 21st Century, in 1999.
Kenan is currently as Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, and serves as a visiting or residential writer in a number of other universities.
In 2007 he published his latest book, The Fire This Time, named for the James Baldwin book The Fire Next Time, who was a great influence for Kenan.