Randall Kenan is the author of a novel, A Visitation of Spirits (Grove Press, 1989), and two collections of stories, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (Harcourt, 1992), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book, and If I Had Two Wings (W. W. Norton, 2020). He also wrote two works of nonfiction: Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (Knopf, 1999), which was nominated for the Southern Book Award, and The Fire This Time (Melville House, 2007). Kenan also edited and wrote the introduction for The Cross of Redemption: The Uncollected Writings of James Baldwin (Pantheon, 2010). He passed away in 2020.