The Carol Grotnes Belk Distinguished Lecture: Randall Kenan: Haints and Boogers

Haints and Boogers: Making a Case for the Supernatural and Other-Natural in Southern Fiction

Award-winning novelist Randall Kenan focuses on the uses of the supernatural in folk stories from around the world as well as in southern ghost stories and the need to document the hurt and unhealed memories in the South. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Kenan spent his childhood in Chinquapin, North Carolina. He received a B.A. in English from UNC-Chapel Hill and held a position on the editorial staff of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., for four years. He has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University and Vassar College. He is currently an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Kenan is the author of the novel A Visitation of Spirits and Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, a book of short stories. He spent several years traveling across America and Canada collecting oral histories of African Americans, which he published in Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century. He is currently working on a third novel, There’s a Man Going Round Taking Names, set in North Carolina and New York City. Kenan is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship among other awards and was honored with the North Carolina Award for Literature in 2005 and was elected to the Fellowship of Southern Writers in 2007.

Kenan will sign books during a reception following the lecture. Books will be available to purchase.

About the Carol Grotnes Belk Distinguished Lecture

Kenan's presentation is the 12th in a series of Carol Grotnes Belk Distinguished Lectures sponsored by Belk Library and Information Commons and is an event of An Appalachian Summer Festival. Irwin and Carol Belk of Charlotte have provided funding for the series through the library’s Carol Grotnes Belk Distinguished Professorship.

Previous speakers in the Carol Grotnes Belk Distinguished Lectures series include regional writers Ron Rash and Sharyn McCrumb and children’s author Gloria Houston.