Free and Open to the Public
Location: Buttrick Hall 101(Google map of this location)

Reading from his most recent work

Randall Kenan’s first novel, A Visitation of Spirits, was published by Grove Press in 1989; and a collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, was published in 1992 by Harcourt, Brace. That collection 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. He is also the author of a young adult biography of James Baldwin (1993), and wrote the text for Norman Mauskoff ’ s book of photographs, A Time Not Here: The Mississippi Delta (1997). Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1999, and was nominated for the Southern Book Award. The Fire this Time , a work of nonfiction, was published in July 2007.

He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, the Sherwood Anderson Award, the John Dos Passos Award, and was the 1997 Rome Prize winner from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was awarded the North Carolina Award for Literature in 2005.

Event is part of The Vanderbilt Visiting Writers Series sponsored by an endowment given to the university by Gertrude and Harold S. Vanderbilt. co-sponsored by Hortense Spillers, The Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English and the Department of English.