Randall Kenan and Jeremy Hawkins will be giving a free, public reading 7pm, Saturday, October 18, 2014, at the NC State University Club (4200 Hillsborough Street, Raleigh, NC) as part of Raleigh Review‘s Southern Recitations series.

Randall Kenan is an author of fiction (short stories and novels) and nonfiction (biography, essay, and more). Among his books is the collection of short stories Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, which was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was among The New York Times Notable Books of 1992. Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century was nominated for the Southern Book Award. His latest book, The Fire This Time, was published in May 2007. He edited and wrote the introduction to The Cross of Redemption: The Uncollected Writings of James Baldwin (2010).

Kenan is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, the Sherwood Anderson Award, the John Dos Passos Prize, 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 and was elected to the Fellowship of Southern Writers in 2007. Currently he is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Jeremy Hawkins‘ debut novel, The Last Days of Video, will be published by Soft Skull Press (an imprint of Counterpoint Press) in March 2015. His fiction has appeared at Diagram, Pacifica, The Molotov Cocktail, and other venues. He earned an MFA in Fiction from UNC-Wilmington, and he is the founder and lead editor of The Distillery, a web-based editing service. Hawkins is also an independent bookseller at Flyleaf Books, and he teaches creative writing at the Carrboro ArtsCenter. He lives in Chapel Hill, NC.

I just read Randall’s book of short stories Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, and loved it! Haven’t read Jeremy’s stuff yet, but, hey, he has chickens, so must be good, right?? 🙂