Randall Kenan Selected Works

Randall Kenana wrote widely and profoundly about what it meant to be Black, gay, and Southern. In astonishing prose, he recollects the memories of his three mothers (especially Mama, his great-aunt), his boyhood fear of snakes, his rapture in books, and his sensual evocations of tobacco picking and hogkilling, butterbeans and scuppernongs, of the eastern North Carolina lowlands where we grew up.

An old man rages in his nursing home, a rich man is haunted by a hog, an elderly woman turns unwitting miracle worker, and Howard Hughes seeks out the woman who once cooked him butter beans. Mingling the earthy with the otherworldly, If I Had Two Wings is a chorus of voices and visions marked by physicality and spirit.

At the intersection of food and story, The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food offers a collection of essays about the best meal, food and memory, the best family tradition, a cherished food ritual, a dreaded food ritual, a favorite recipe, the worst recipe, the worst meal, the funniest meal. These food-related stories are set in North Carolina, though geography is sometimes secondary to the main theme, which is food in any form: meals and manners, cooking and ingredients, recipes and recollections.

The pieces include a humorous story by Michael Parker about his mother’s soup disaster; a tour of Duplin County barbeque joints by Celia Rivenbark; Hal Crowther’s evening as a reluctant carnivore at a ribfest; chef Cathy Cleary’s favorite tomato pie. Writer and goat farmer Tom Rankin writes about taking his goats to be slaughtered in Sanford by a halal butcher from Afghanistan. John McElwee takes us to the annual celebratory Blue Monday shad fry along the Cape Fear River. Some of North Carolina’s favorite writers and chefs regale us with stories: Lee Smith, Frances Mayes, Daniel Wallace, Marianne Gingher, Wiley Cash, Bland Simpson, Jill McCorkle, Jaki Shelton Green, Michael Malone, and Wilton Barnhardt. It also includes stories by chefs Vivian Howard (of PBS’s A Chef’s Life) and Crook’s Corner’s popular chef Bill Smith, and noted cookbook authors Marcie Cohen Ferris and Nancie McDermott.

Edited by Randall Kenan.

Randall Kenan's daring and innovative first novel weaves a vivid and horrific tale through the generations of a black Southern family.

Sixteen-year old Horace Cross is plagued by issues that hover in his impressionable spirit and take shape in his mind as loathsome demons, culminating in one night of horrible and tragic transformation. In the face of Horace's fate, his cousin Reverend James "Jimmy" Green questions the values of a community that nourishes a boy, places their hopes for salvation on him, only to deny him his destiny. Told in a montage of voices and memories, A Visitation of the Spirits shows just how richly populated a family's present is with the spirits of the past and the future.