North Carolina LGBTQ+ Literature
N C L R ONLINE
9
SHE WOULD SOMETIMES SIT BY HERSELF ON THE PATIO LATE OF AN EVENING, IN THE SAME CHAIR SHE WAS SITTING
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IN NOW, SIP FROM HER COCA-COLA, AND THINK ABOUT HOW BIG THE EARTH MUST BE TO SEEM FLAT TO THE EYE.
thy word have I hidden in my heart – number 8 (mixed media on canvas, 30x40) by Ashon T. Crawley
RANDALL KENAN (1963–2020) grew up in Chinquapin, NC, and earned English and Creative Writing degrees from UNC Chapel Hill. He taught courses at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University and worked for Random House and Alfred A. Knopf before joining the faculty at UNC Chapel Hill. He is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, including the novel A Visitation of Spirits (Grove Press, 1989); the short story collection If I Had Two Wings (W.W. Norton, 2020; reviewed in NCLR Online 2021); and the posthumously published collection of essays, Black Folk Could Fly: Selected Writings (W.W.
I Of course they didn’t pay it any mind at first: just a tractor – one of the most natural things in the world to see in a field – kicking dust up into the afternoon sky and slowly toddling off the road into a soybean field. And fields surrounded Mrs. Maggie MacGowan Williams’s house, giving the impression that her lawn stretched on and on until it dropped off into the woods far by the way. Sometimes she was certain she could actually see the earth’s curve – not merely the bend of the small hill on which her house sat but the great slope of the sphere, the way scientists explained it in books, a monstrous globe floating in a cold nothingness. She would sometimes sit by herself on the patio late of an evening, in the same chair she was sitting in now, sip from her Coca-Cola, and think about how big the earth must be to seem flat to the eye. She wished she were alone now. It was Sunday. “Now I wonder what that man is doing with a tractor out there today?”
Norton, 2022; reviewed in NCLR Online Winter 2024). Among his numerous awards and honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Sherwood Anderson Award, a Whiting Award, the John Dos Passos Prize, the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the North Carolina Award for Literature. He was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2018. Read an interview with him in NCLR 2019, an interview essay in NCLR 2006, and articles about his work in NCLR 2008, 2012, 2021, and 2025.