Randall Kenan (1963-2020) was an American author who was born in Brooklyn, but moved to North Carolina at a young age and spent much of his life there. Many of his novels focus on what it means to be black and gay in the southern United States. He attended UNC, receiving his undergraduate degree in 1985. Kenan’s first novel, A Visitation of Spirits in 1989, was followed by a 1992 short story collection, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, which was set in the fictional town of Tim’s Creek, NC. 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 one of The New York Times Notable Books of 1992. He also wrote a young adult biography of author and MacDowell Fellow James Baldwin.
In 2020 he wrote an open letter reflecting on his experience as a Black student at UNC in the 1980s, and the changes prompted by civil unrest, demands for racial justice, and the removal of Confederate statues across the South. “For me — a poor black boy from the swamps of Eastern North Carolina — the Civil War was far from a lost cause, let alone a done war. I had underestimated how unfinished,” he wrote.
Kenan received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the Sherwood Anderson Award, the John Dos Passos Prize, and the 1997 Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He received the North Carolina Award for Literature in 2005, the state’s highest civilian award; and was made a Fellow of the Fellowship of Southern Writers in 2007. He was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2018. He taught for more than 20 years, including stints at Duke University, Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University, and Vassar College. He was a professor of English and comparative literature at UNC-Chapel Hill at the time of his death.
