Author Randall Kenan visits UNL

Author Randall Kenan considers it a badge of honor to have ruffled someone's feathers.

Certainly this is a vital perspective to have when one writes about growing up poor, black and gay in the American South.

Yet, as Bill and Ted would say, and as the oft-laughing Kenan himself references, it all comes down to being "excellent" to one another.

Kenan is the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Writer-in-Residence this spring, teaching a creative writing workshop, giving lectures and readings and visiting public schools across the city.

Tonight at 7, Kenan will read from both his fiction and nonfiction at the Center for Great Plains Studies Gallery, with a reception and book signing to follow.

"We need our students to have an opportunity to experience diversity," said Jonis Agee, director of creative writing at UNL.

"He offers a unique voice and broadens the imagination of students."

Kenan, an associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, considers his experiences as a Writer-in-Residence and visiting professor at other universities to have been mostly positive ones.

"I've done this at a lot of places," he said.

"It's always fun to see what is going on in other parts of the world and seeing other writers and getting to hang out."

Kenan stresses such exchanges of inspiration throughout the writing process.

He describes both his fiction and nonfiction works as "squarely out of the Southern tradition, with modernist and postmodernist influences," listing James Baldwin, Toni Morrison and Gabriel Garcia Marquez as further inspiration.

As a creator and communicator, Kenan favors the realm of literature and, more specifically, the realm of fiction.

"Most movies are about two hours. That's a limited amount of space," Kenan said. "(Books) give you much more of an opportunity to go in depth and to explore things."

"It is important to have … works in more than one genre," said Agee, adding that it is key to see that Kenan is "not limited to a single genre or way of expressing himself."

These imaginative expressions and explorations are what Kenan emphasizes in his preference for fiction over nonfiction.

"I get a lot of pleasure out of making things and creating worlds of people and having conversations with them," Kenan said of his writing process, further stating that "you can tell the truth more plainly in fiction."

The truth that Kenan often tries to portray carries heavy social themes on the concept of African-American identity.

Some of his better-known works are "Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century" from 2000 and the critically-praised collection of short stories "Let the Dead Bury their Dead" from 1992.

As for where he sees room for the most social or political progress, Kenan is rather nonspecific.

"It all comes down to treating other people decently and like human beings," he said. "I think that on any social or political issue it comes down to that."
emilywalkenhorst@dailynebraskan.com