NCLR announces new Randall Kenan Prize
A central mission of the North Carolina Literary Review (NCLR), produced at East Carolina University, is to introduce and promote new North Carolina writers. To this aim, NCLR has collaborated with the creative writing program at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill to establish the Randall Kenan Prize for interviews with or the study of new North Carolina writers published in NCLR.
“In addition to encouraging critical attention to neglected writers with the John Ehle Prize, established a few years ago, we also want to encourage interviews and essays that introduce new North Carolina writers who might not be on our readers’ radar,” said Dr. Margaret Bauer, NCLR editor.
According to Bauer, the prize honors the memory of Kenan who was an author and professor. “I remember when Randall was a new writer, about the time I took over editing NCLR 25 years ago,” Bauer said. He was the youngest writer included in the Norton anthology of Southern literature, first published in 1997, Bauer said.
Bauer contacted Daniel Wallace, director of creative writing at UNC, Kenan’s alma mater and where he taught for most of his career. Wallace agreed to partner with NCLR on the new prize, providing a $250 honorarium to the annual recipient of the award.
Kenan received his Bachelor of Arts in English and creative writing from UNC in 1987. After working in publishing and teaching in other states, Kenan returned to North Carolina and was the first William Blackburn Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University in 1994. The next year he joined the faculty at his alma mater, where he continued to teach until his sudden death in 2020.
Kenan set most of his fiction in a place he called Tim’s Creek in eastern North Carolina. Much of his work focuses on what it means to be black and a part of the LGBTQ+ community in the South. His most recent book, “If I Had Two Wings,” was published just before his death. The collection made the shortlist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction.
The first Randall Kenan Prize will go to Jim Coby for his interview with speculative fiction writer Nathan Ballingrud, “a writer definitely not on my radar,” Bauer said, until she read the interview. Coby’s interview, “‘It’s based on nothing but fear, by a compulsion to catastrophize’: A Conversation with Nathan Ballingrud,” is included in NCLR’s 30th annual print issue, due out this summer.
Coby received his doctorate in English with a focus on Southern literature from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and is an English professor at Indiana University Kokomo. He is a regular NCLR book reviewer, including a review of Ballingrud’s recent short fiction collection in NCLR Online 2021 and an interview with Matthew Griffin for NCLR 2017. His edited collection, “Boom! Splat! Comics and Violence,” is under contract with the University Press of Mississippi.
Coby’s interview subject, Ballingrud, lives with his family in Asheville. His work seeks to push the horror genre, with a focus on the horror of maintaining stability in the face of terror. He has published two collections of stories, “North American Lake Monsters” and “Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell.” He is a two-time winner of the Shirley Jackson Award and has been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award, World Fantasy Award and British Fantasy Award. His novella “The Visible Filth” was made into a film called “Wounds,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2019.
“I’ve been a fan of Nathan Ballingrud’s work since I first encountered the story ‘North American Lake Monsters,’ and it’s a privilege to have been able to interview him,” Coby said. “Additionally, it’s an honor to receive an award named after the late Randall Kenan, another author I have great admiration for. Like Randall Kenan, Ballingrud has a talent for finding the human within a story replete with supernatural and evil elements.”
View NCLR submission guidelines. Qualifying essays and interviews will be considered annually for the Randall Kenan Prize. In years with more than one work eligible for the prize, a judge will be selected to choose the winner under blind review. The theme for the 2022 issue will be “Writers Who Teach, Teachers Who Write,” but submissions for the Kenan Prize do not have to fit the theme. Submissions for the 2022 prize should be received by Aug. 31.
For more information visit nclr.ecu.edu.