Randall Kenan

Randall Kenan is an American author of fiction and nonfiction. Raised in a rural community in North Carolina, Kenan has focused his fiction on what it means to be black and gay in the southern United States. Among his books is the collection of short stories Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, which was named a New York Times Notable Book in 1992. Kenan is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award and the John Dos Passos Prize.

Kenan strongly identifies with both his African American and gay identities, both of which were highlighted in his next two books. In 1993 he 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).

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

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