Randall Kenan (fiction) is the author of a novel, A Visitation of Spirits (Grove Press, 1989), and a collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (Harcourt, Brace, 1992), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, a nominee for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, and a New York Times Notable Book (1992). He has written a young adult biography, James Baldwin: Author (Chelsea House, 1994), and two works of nonfiction, Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), which was nominated for the Southern Book Award, and The Fire This Time (Melville House Books, 2007). He is also the author of the text for Norman Mauskopf’s book of photographs, A Time Not Here: The Mississippi Delta (Twin Palms Publishers, TwelveTrees Press, 1997). Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Sherwood Anderson Award, and the 1997 Rome Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, he was the John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. He now teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.