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 for 1992.  Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the 21st Century is his work of nonfiction.  He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers' Award, and the Sherwood Anderson Award.  He teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.