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James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time was one of the essential and galvanizing books of the American civil rights movement.  In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, with a new generation of Americans confronting what Baldwin called our “racial nightmare,” Randall Kenan in The Fire This Time (Melville House, 2007) asks, “How far have we come?”  Mr. Kenan notes that despite dramatic advances, new issues have combined with old to bedevil us.  Religion so key in the sixties—both Christian and Muslim—has become more dominant and intolerant.  The government and courts have shifted to the right, while Hip-hop has replaced the stirring music so vital to the sixties movement.

Like Baldwin, Mr. Kenan is acclaimed for both his fiction and nonfiction, which include a biography of Baldwin and numerous essays on issues that concern him—such as class, religion, being a gay African American, and the failing perception that America has conquered racism.  The shocking revelations of New Orleans confirmed a shameful truth.  Randall Kenan declares that truth and seeks its transcendence in his impassioned new book.

Mr. Kenan is also the author of Walking on Water, Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (Alfred A. Knopf, March 1999), which is a profoundly moving and provocative account of the thinking, feelings and lives of African Americans in the nineties.  Mr. Kenan spent eight years traversing the United States and gathered more than 200 vivid and various interviews, which disclose the wide range of experience in black American life.  In its March 14, 1999 review of Walking on Water, The New York Times said,  “In talking to individuals seemingly so unrepresentative of the group he wants to understand, Kenan violates every rule of the sociologist. And that may just be the reason his book succeeds so well as a work of insight and compassion.”

Of his second book, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992) Henry Louis Gates, Jr. wrote, “By turns erotic, funny and poignant, Randall Kenan’s stories are animated by an unflagging inventiveness and a generous moral imagination.  Kenan is truly a fabulist of our times.”  The book was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for fiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was among The New York Times Notable Books of 1992.  Told in a montage of voices and memories, his first novel, A Visitation of Spirits (Random House, 1989) illustrates just how richly a black Southern family’s present is populated with the spirits of the past and future.  Mr. Kenan is also the author of a young adult biography, James Baldwin: American Writer (Chelsea House Publications, 1993) and wrote the text for Norman Mauskopf’s book of photographs, A Time Not Here:  The Mississippi Delta (Twin Palms, 1996).

Born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1963, Randall Kenan spent his childhood in Chinquapin, NC.  He graduated from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and then worked on the editorial staff of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.  In 1989 he began teaching writing at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University.  He was the first William Blackburn Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University in 1994, the Edouard Morot-Sir Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at his alma mater in 1995.  Subsequently, he was the John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi, and then taught at the University of Memphis.  Mr. Kenan currently teaches writing at UNC Chapel Hill. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, and the John Dos Passos Prize.

People Are Saying

“Randall Kenan continues Baldwin’s legendary tradition of ‘telling it on the mountain.’”
                                            San Francisco Chronicle

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