Link to Randall Kenan’s profile page and purchase his books on the Whiting Award website: https://www.whiting.org/awards/winners/randall-kenan#/

Purchase The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food (Eno Publishers): http://www.enopublishers.org/books/the-carolina-table-north-carolina-writers-on-food

Listen to Randall Kenan read his entire story, “The Rooster, the Rattlesnake, and the Hydrangea Bush,” from The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food:

Podcast music for “Remembering Dinner With Randall Kenan”: “Mistreated Blues,” by Mississippi Lightnin’ Available on Soundstripe. https://app.soundstripe.com/songs/12706

Listen to Randall Kenan interviewed on the Soundings Project in 1994 https://cdn.lib.unc.edu/soundings//Soundings_ep728.mp3Soundings

Episode 1: Show notes

Remembering Dinner With Randall Kenan

The late author on food, writing & cranky roosters

Writer Randall Kenan had a passion for food. Before he died last year, he dropped by for dinner and stayed to talk about the importance of food in his life, in his upbringing, in literature, in culture, in bridging divides. He revealed his deep fondness for the humble butterbean. He also read excerpts from “The Rooster, the Rattlesnake, and the Hydrangea Bush,” the lead essay in Eno Publishers’s The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food, which he edited.

Bio note—

Randall Kenan grew up in Chinquapin (population: 86) in Eastern North Carolina, a landscape that illuminated much of his fiction. His fiction includes A Visitation of Spirits, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead,and If I Had Two Wings. The last volume was published a month before he died and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award. He also was a master of nonfiction, publishing books and essays about an array of subjects from his deep appreciation of James Baldwin to his passion for Southern foodways, American history, and pop culture to his exploration of what it is to be Black in our recently Jim-Crow haunted nation. Randall was editor of and wrote the lead essay for The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food, published by Eno Publishers. He also was a contributing author to Eno’s book, 27 Views of Hillsborough: A Southern Town in Prose and Poetry.