Born in Brooklyn, New York, at six weeks old Kenan moved to Duplin County, North Carolina, a small rural community, where he lived with his grandparents in a town named Wallace.
Randall Kenan was born in Brooklyn, New York, but at only six weeks old he moved to a small town named Wallace, where he lived with his grandparents.
On the weekends, Kenan's great-aunt Mary and great-uncle Redden would take him to their family farm which was located in Chinquapin, North Carolina, only about 15 miles east of Wallace.
[3] Kenan attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, beginning in the fall of 1981 and he graduated in 1985 with degrees in English and Creative Writing.
Her efforts were not immediately successful, and it was not until a few months after graduation that Kenan received an offer to work for the book publisher Random House in New York City.
Kenan worked at Knopf for only two months before he was promoted to assistant to the executive vice president, where he remained in that position for five years.
The stories, based in the fictional community of Tims Creek, focused on (among other things) what it meant to be poor, black, and gay in the southern United States.
In 1993, Kenan published a young adult biography of gay African-American novelist and essayist James Baldwin.