By Virginia Yopp, 2017-18 Literary Contest Chair

Raleigh Fine Arts Society Welcomes Renowned North Carolina Author Randall Kenan as the 40th Annual Literary Contest Awards Ceremony Guest Speaker

By Virginia Yopp, 2017-18 Literary Contest Chair

“To open eyes to the possibilities, and get people excited about all the worlds they can access with words. To bring correct and rigorous and kind and honest assessment of the work at hand, and to encourage the writer to make it better. The best writers I have had the joy to have worked with in the past have all had two things in common: they were exceptionally well-read, and didn’t – and haven’t – given up.”

This was Randall Kenan’s response to the question “What is your philosophy on teaching?” in a 2015 interview with Pine Manor College.Kenan is anAmerican novelist, short story writer, biographer, and critic. He is recognized as one of the most astute and giftedblack writers in America today… and he is a teacher.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1963 and raised in Chinquapin, North Carolina, Randall Garrett Kenan graduated from the University of North Carolinain 1985 with degrees in English and Creative Writing.He has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University, Duke University, University of Mississippi, Oxford, University of Memphis and Vassar College. He now teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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 AngelesTimesBook Award for Fiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was amongThe New York TimesNotable Books of 1992.

“Randall Kenan’s second work of fiction is nothing short of a wonder-book . . . Fiercely and relentlessly, hilariously and sympathetically, Randall Kenan unfolds layer upon layer of the interlocked existences of his Tims Creek citizens. In Let the Dead Bury Their Dead he has created, in a single obscure hamlet, a deeply and peculiarly American community, as memorable as any I have encountered in recent fiction.” —The New York Times

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 Centurywas 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.

From 1985 to 1989, he worked on the editorial staff of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., publishers. In 1989, he began teaching writing at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University. He was the first William Blackburn Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University in the fall of 1994, and the EdourdMorot-Sir Visiting Professor of Creating Writing at UNC-Chapel Hill in 1995. He was the John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi, Oxford (1997-98), Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Memphis, and held the Lehman Brady Professorship at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. He has also taught urban literature at Vassar College.

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.

This year marks our 40th Literary Contest, a short-story competition open to students in grades 10, 11, or 12 in any public or private high school in Wake County. We opened for student submissions on November 7 and already have stories “in the queue,” thanks to the hard work of Schools Committee chair Graham Satisky and the energetic new members serving as school representatives. Submissions close Thursday, January 18, teachers must complete their review by January 25, and judging begins immediately afterward. We plan to notify the winners by the week of March 20.

Kenan will share his experiences with the winners of the Literary Contest and their teachers, family, and friends during the Literary Contest Awards Ceremony at the North Carolina Museum of History on Tuesday, April 17. The 6 p.m. reception and 7 p.m. presentation are open to Raleigh Fine Arts Society members and to the public. He will also sit in on the Writers’ Workshop preceding the ceremony. The workshop brings student winners together with the three final judges for a lively session of constructive commentary on their stories.

Please help us welcome Randallto Raleigh Fine Arts Society’s 40th annual Literary Contest by attending the Reception and Awards Presentation on April 17, 2018. We will partner with Quail Ridge Books to have his books for sale and available for signing by the author.

In closing, I leave you with Kenan’s response to the question “What expectations do you have of your students?” in the aforementioned2015 interview with Pine Manor College.

“If they become better and deeper and wider readers, then the race will be largely won, for without that main ingredient -- to be a good reader -- no growth as a writer will happen. The next step, in learning to apply the lessons learned into your prose, must be an individual commitment that only time will tell, with practice and effort, long after the classroom has been abandoned. I can help with the first step and only encourage the second.”