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Randall Kenan, the novelist, short story and nonfiction writer, will read and talk in Winston-Salem on Sept. 8. He will appear at 7 p.m. in the auditorium of the main branch of the Forsyth County Library.

Raised in Chinquapin – hey, that’s Duplin County for all you who don’t know your eastern North Carolina geography – Kenan’s work is praised for its evocation of African American rural life. If you’ve ever been to Duplin County, you know why his focus is rural, not urban.

He’s the author of Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, a collection of short stories that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a New York Times Notable Book. He’s written a novel, A Visitation of Spirits, a young adult biography of James Baldwin, and a work of nonfiction, The Fire This Time. Other works include Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century and text for a book of photographs, A Time Not Here: The Mississippi Delta.

Kenan was awarded the North Carolina Award for Literature in 2005. He’s the recipient of a Guggenheim, a Whiting Writers Award, the Sherwood Anderson Award, the John Dos Passos Award, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has taught at Sarah Lawrence, Columbia, the University of Mississippi, the University of Memphis, Duke, and Vassar. He’s now associate professor of English and comparative literature at UNC-Chapel Hill, where he graduated in 1985.

Kenan’s appearance at the library is part of Authors on the Road, a program preliminary to the N.C. Literary Festival. The free festival with more than 100 authors will be held Sept.10-13 at UNC-CH. http://www.ncliteraryfestival.org/