Works by
Randall Kenan
(Writer)
[1963 - ]

• A Visitation of Spirits: A Novel (1989)
  Randall Kenan's daring and innovative first novel weaves a vivid and horrific tale through the generations of a black Southern family.
  
  Sixteen-year old Horace Cross is plagued by issues that hover in his impressionable spirit and take shape in his mind as loathsome demons, culminating in one night of horrible and tragic transformation. In the face of Horace's fate, his cousin Reverend James "Jimmy" Green questions the values of a community that nourishes a boy, places their hopes for salvation on him, only to deny him his destiny.
  
  Told in a montage of voices and memories, A Visitation of the Spirits just how richly populated a family's present is with the spirits of the past and the future.

• Let the Dead Bury Their Dead and Other Stories (1992) -- Winner 1992 Lambda Literary Award for Male Fiction; Nominated 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award
  Set in North Carolina, these are stories about blacks and whites, young and old, rural and sophisticated, the real and fantastical.

• James Baldwin: American Writer, Lives of Notable Gay Men and Lesbians (1994) with Martin Duberman
  Describes the life of the writer James Baldwin, focusing on his experiences as an African-American civil rights worker and as a gay man.

• Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (1999)
  Walking on Water is a profoundly moving and provocative account--both timely and enduring--of the thoughts, the feelings, the lives, of African Americans in the post-Civil Rights era of the nineties, by the highly praised author of Let the Dead Bury Their Dead and A Visitation of Spirits.
  
  Traversing the country over a period of six years, Randall Kenan talked to nearly two hundred African Americans, whose individual stories he has shaped into a continent-sized tapestry of black American life today. He starts his journey in the famous, long-standing black resort community on Martha's Vineyard, travels up through New England, and heads west, visiting Chicago, Minneapolis (home of the singer Prince and  of the Pilgrim Baptist Church, with its seven choirs and vast outreach), Coeur d'Alene (skinhead capital of the world), Seattle, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. He moves on to the South, to Louisiana and St. Simons Island, where so many slave ships landed, and ends up at home in North Carolina, telling his own family's story.
  
  Kenan talks to a wide variety of people: to the Harlem Renaissance writer Dorothy West; to the Republican congressman from Alaska, Walter Furnace; to a rising young air force major whose father was lynched in Alabama when the major was a child; to a vocal welfare mom. He interviews a retired railroad conductor, an energetic "child of the dream" majoring in public relations at the University of North Dakota, Atlanta's new Panther-style militants, a bisexual AIDS activist, a twelve-year-old girl who fought the racism at her elementary school with a stunning essay, a Baptist minister in Mormon Utah. He speaks to teachers, retired maids, filmmakers, dancers, entrepreneurs, cyberspace whizzes, lawyers, farmers, painters, and many, many more.
  
  The people we meet--each with his or her own unique slant on black life--are fascinating. And as we listen to them, a multifaceted portrait of the black community at the end of the century emerges, with its diverse and little-known local cultures, its widely varying accommodations to integration, its desire to keep the soul-satisfying elements of black life intact while integrating with the larger society, its many ways of coping with the discrimination that remains: its triumphs, its problems, its optimism in spite of all the odds.
  
  Walking on Water is a richer, sharper, fuller picture than we have yet had of the astonishing experience of being black in America.

Other

• The Rough Road Home: Stories by North Carolina Writers (1992), Robert Gingher, ed.
  With works by Alice Adams, Allan Gurganus, Clyde Edgerton, Daphne Athas, Donald Secreast, Doris Betts, Elizabeth Cox, Elizabeth Spencer, Fred Chappell, Jill McCorkle, Kaye Gibbons, Lee Smith,Lee Zacharias, Linda Beatrice Brown, Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Max Steele, Maya Angelou, Randall Kenan, Reynolds Price, Robert Morgan, and Tim McLaurin.

See also:

• A Time Not Here: The Mississippi Delta (1997)
  Photography by Norman Mauskoff, text by Randall Kenan