Randall Kenan
Prize-winning African-American writer Randall Kenan has been called "our 'black' Garcia Márquez" by novelist Terry McMillan. Kenan is the author of the novel A Visitation of Spirits, the brilliant collection of stories Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, and most recently, the journalistic account Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century. Winner of a Whiting Award and many others, Randall Kenan represents, according to Dorothy Allison, "the hope and future of Western literature." Kenan grew up in Chinquapin, North Carolina and graduated from the University of North Carolina. He has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia, Duke, and the University of Mississippi. He is currently teaching at the University of Memphis and is currently working on a novel set in both North Carolina and New York City.