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Randall Kenan, Southern Writer of Magical Realism, Dies at 57

His upbringing in North Carolina helped him create a fictional hamlet, Tims Creek, where a 3-year-old clairvoyant scares the neighbors and a pig talks.

Randall Kenan, whose fiction blended myth, magic, mysticism and realism, in 2008.Credit...Mark Derewicz/UNC-Chapel Hil

Randall Kenan, an award-winning gay Black writer whose fiction, set largely in a North Carolina hamlet similar to the one in which he grew up, blended myth, magic, mysticism and realism, was found dead on Aug. 28 at his home in Hillsborough, N.C. He was 57.

His cousin Nakia Brown confirmed the death but said he did not know the cause. Five years ago, Mr. Kenan learned he had had a mini-stroke and was developing heart problems.

Mr. Kenan died three weeks before his short story collection, “If I Had Two Wings,” was selected as one of 10 nominees for the National Book Award for fiction, the winner of which will be announced on Oct. 6.

In his novel, “A Visitation of Spirits” (1989), and in two short story collections that were published 28 years apart, Mr. Kenan (pronounced KEY-nan) developed the fictional Tims Creek, a backwater founded by a runaway slave named Pharaoh.

The inhabitants include Horace Cross, a straight-A high school student from a prominent Black family whose torment in “Visitation” over being gay leads to a decision to cast out what he sees as a homosexuality demon.

“As he continued to chant the name of the demon, his eyes wide with fright, he wondered in part of his mind what the demon would look like,” Mr. Kenan wrote. “Tall, perhaps taller than the apple trees, the pine trees even. Red and fierce, with huge yellow teeth and foul breath. But no, this was a great demon, a member of Satan’s High Court, the Inner Cabal.”

In a tale in the collection “Let the Dead Bury Their Dead” (1992), Mr. Kenan conjured up a boy, Clarence, who at age 3 begins speaking in sophisticated sentences. He expresses a clairvoyance that frightens the townspeople because he knows their secrets and those of their dead, and his mystical presence leads a pig to converse.

In his review in The New York Times, the novelist Howard Frank Mosher wrote that “Let the Dead Bury Their Dead” was “nothing short of a wonder-book.”

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Mr. Kenan’s stories were set largely in a North Carolina hamlet similar to the one where he grew up.

In the short story “The Eternal Glory That Is Ham Hocks,” which appears in the collection “If I Had Two Wings,” published last month, Mr. Kenan transported the billionaire Howard Hughes to Tims Creek in search of the Black woman who had cooked for him as a teenager in Houston. Learning that she has died, he offers her daughter outlandish sums to cook for him in Las Vegas.

Mr. Kenan recalled thinking for a long time about how to bring the eccentric Hughes to Tims Creek, the type of odd juxtaposition that he reveled in.

“I couldn’t have him come looking for the love of his life,” Mr. Kenan told the interviewer Jason Jefferies on his “Bookin’” podcast last month. But, he said, he felt that an “old and dotty” Hughes might seek out the old woman whose cooking had long ago ignited his taste buds.

“That idea made sense to me,” he added. “Even the most coldhearted person eats.”

Randall Garrett Kenan was born on March 12, 1963, in Brooklyn to Harry Lee Kenan and Clara Dunn. As an infant, he was taken in by his paternal grandparents in Wallace, N.C., about 40 miles north of Wilmington, but their dry cleaning business left them little time for him. His great-aunt Mary Kenan Hall, a teacher who had doted on him at her home in nearby Chinquapin on weekends, raised him.

“One weekend, she just didn’t bring me back,” Mr. Kenan told James A. Crank, the author of “Understanding Randall Kenan,” a study of his work published in 2019.

His parents, with whom he did not develop a relationship, are his only immediate survivors.

Ms. Hall kept young Randall reading books like “Peter Cottontail,” “Robinson Crusoe” and “The Swiss Family Robinson.” He studied engineering in high school and initially studied physics at the University of North Carolina, but he was drawn to writing fiction under the guidance of a teacher, Max Steele. When he was a senior, James Baldwin and Alex Haley, the author of “Roots,” spoke to one of his classes.

Mr. Kenan graduated in 1985 with a bachelor’s degree in creative writing and found work in publishing, joining Random House and rising to assistant editor at Alfred A. Knopf while working on “A Visitation of Spirits.” The novel’s central theme, he later told the arts and literature journal Image, was “how hard it can be to reconcile a rational view of the world with the irrational reality of lived, hands-on experience, where a lot of things don’t make sense.”

Leaving publishing to teach, he took posts at Vassar College, Duke University, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Mississippi, Oxford, before joining the faculty at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill in 2003. He taught creative writing and food writing there.

“He had the most capacious mind and heart of anybody I’ve ever known,” Daniel Wallace, the director of the creative writing program at Chapel Hill, said in a phone interview.

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Mr. Kenan in 2018. “He had the most capacious mind and heart of anybody I’ve ever known,” a friend said.  Credit...Dr. Sarah Boyd/UNC-Chapel Hill

The novelist Tayari Jones, who met Mr. Kenan at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in 2004, said he had not resisted being characterized as gay, Black or Southern.

“He embodied all of them, but he’d be loath to make a hierarchy of them,” she said. “He didn’t say, ‘Don’t label me.’ He wore them all as ornaments.”

Mr. Kenan won the 1992 Lambda Literary Award for gay fiction. His other honors include a Guggenheim fellowship; a Whiting Award for emerging writers, in 1994; and, in 2002, the John Dos Passos Prize, given by Longwood University in Virginia.

In the long years between his short-story collections, Mr. Kenan wrote nonfiction, including “Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century” (1999), for which he traveled the United States to explore what it meant to be Black; a biography of James Baldwin for young adult readers; and “The Fire This Time” (2007), a commentary on race inspired by Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time.” He also edited “The Cross of Redemption” (2010), a collection of Baldwin’s unpublished writings.

In Mr. Kenan’s last published piece, which appeared last month on the website Literary Hub, he wrote about the increasing outcry against Confederate statues in the South and their removal.

In the mid-1980s, he said, it would have been as improbable as science fiction to imagine that any Confederate monuments would come down.

“Still, what I most would have struggled to imagine is that certain people would be up in arms were it to ever happen,” he wrote. “That they would quite literally take over a state capital building, bearing arms, in anger to keep monuments up. That we might have another civil war over the matter.

“Can we seize the moment?” he asked. “We all must now readjust our thinking.”

Richard Sandomir is an obituaries writer. He previously wrote about sports media and sports business. He is also the author of several books, including “The Pride of the Yankees: Lou Gehrig, Gary Cooper and the Making of a Classic.” More about Richard Sandomir

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: Randall Kenan, Writer Whose Realm Was Magical Realism, Dies at 57. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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