A Memphis-based writer and teacher who spent six years interviewing African Americans from the East Coast to Alaska will visit Mississippi State University in late March.
At 8 p.m. on the 30th, Randall Kenan will read from his latest book, "Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the 21st Century." The free public program will be held at the Starkville Community Theater, 108 East Main St.
Kenan is a member of the University of Memphis faculty. His presentation is another in the MSU English department's 1999-2000 Visiting Writers Series.
In "Walking," he provides a commentary on black life in America based on more than 200 interviews, including a welfare mom, a Baptist minister from Utah, a church janitor, a Republican congressman, and an ex-Los Angeles gang member. A 1999 New York Times review described the book as "a work of insight and compassion."
He was formerly an assistant editor at Alfred A. Knopf publishers and a faculty member at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia and Duke universities, and the University of Mississippi.
Kenan earlier wrote "A Visitation of Spirits," a novel, and "Let the Dead Bury Their Dead," a collection of short stories. The latter was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Additionally, he authored a young-adult biography of James Baldwin and the text for Norman Mauskoff's book of photographs, "A Time Not Here: The Mississippi Delta."
