Snapshots

SE North Carolina Snapshot

‘Unapologetically’ Black, gay & Southern, Randall Kenan leaves lasting legacy

Not many folks begin their lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., and wind up in the tiny barely-a-town community of Chinquapin in Duplin County. But then, from the start, it was clear that Randall Garrett Kenan wasn’t your average Joe.

Kenan made a name for himself as an award-winning writer, described as “the unapologetically Black, gay

Southerner who used all his identities to tell the stories only he could tell.”

Te 57-year-old passed away on Aug. 29 at his home in Hillsborough.

His roots, however, remained firmly planted in Chinquapin. “Growing up on my aunt’s farm was all foundational,” he told the Duplin Times in 2015.

“She was a kindergarten teacher and most of those stories come from those experiences.”

Kenan graduated from

East Duplin High School and went on the University of North Carolina at Chapel

Hill, where he earned a degree in English and creative writing.

His first novel, “A Visitation of Spirits,” was published in 1989. He followed that by a collection of short stories, titled, “Let the Dead Bury Teir Dead,” in 1992. For that collection, he was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was also named among the New York Times Notable Books of 1992.

“I had the fire in my belly to get that first book done,” he said in 2015. “It was about growing up in Chinquapin and the people I knew. I spent a lot of time scraping with that early material. It wasn’t until my second book that I got any attention.”

Other works included a young adult biography of James Baldwin in 1993, and “Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century” in 1999.

Most recently, he had published “If I Had Two Wings,” another short story collection and an essay, “Letter from North Carolina: Learning from Ghosts of the Civil War,” about Chapel Hill and its “toppling Confederate monuments.”

His numerous awards

Randall Garrett Kenan

and recognitions include: 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, the North Carolina Award for Literature, and he was named a Fellow of the Fellowship of Southern Writers in 2007. He was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2018.

At the time of his death, he was an associate professor of English and comparative literature at UNC.

A cause of death wasn’t readily made public, but Te News & Observer reported that Kenan had heart-related issues and had suffered a stroke a few years prior.

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SE PICKS: Kenan’s Works

If I Had Two Wings

Kenan’s latest collection of short stories, published in August, is described on Amazon as: “In Kenan’s fictional territory of Tims Creek (based on Chinquapin), an old man rages in his nursing home, a parson beats up an adulterer, a rich man is haunted by a hog, and an elderly woman turns unwitting miracle worker. A retired plumber travels to Manhattan, where Billy Idol sweeps him into his entourage. An architect who lost his famous lover to AIDS reconnects with a high-school fling. Howard Hughes seeks out the woman who once cooked him butter beans.”

Let The Dead Bury Their Dead

Kenan’s most well-known book, “Let Te Dead Bury Teir Dead,” is described as “Stories about blacks and whites, young and old, rural and sophisticated, the real and fantastical,” all set in North Carolina. Te book was named one of the New York Times Notable Books of 1992, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

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