Randall Kenan is the author of five books, including A Visitation of Spirits and Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, a nominee for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction and a New York Times Notable Book. He has recently published two works of nonfiction: Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century and The Fire This Time. Kenan has received a Whiting Writers Award and the Sherwood Anderson Award. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.