The Fire This Time

“An inventive writer who shows great promise… Kenan continues Baldwin’s legendary tradition of ‘telling it on the mountain’ by giving a voice to the unvarnished truth about blacks.”—The San Francisco Chronicle“Kenan demands attention. He often seems to speak rather than to write: one feels more a listener than a reader, drawing a chair up to his fire.”—The Observer“A talented young novelist and short-story writer… What makes Kenan…so unusual is his willingness to look beyond the usual places.”—The New York Times“Kenan [presents] a magnificent panoramic view of what it means to be human, filled with insight and wisdom and provocation, cause for hope and celebration.”—The Times-Picayune

Randall Kenan (1963-2020) was the author of the biography James Baldwin- American Writer, and the collection of oral histories Walking on Water- Black American Lives at the Turn of the 21st Century, as well as the novel A Visitation of Spirits, and the short story collection Let the Dead Bury Their Dead. His last work of fiction, If I Had Two Wings, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and over his career, his work was awarded numerous honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, the Sherwood Anderson Award, the John Dos Passos Award, the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and numerous other prizes.

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