American writer Randall Kenan will read from his work on Wednesday, Sept. 17 at 4:30 p.m. in Wall Auditorium at Coastal Carolina University. Kenan's visit is part of the University's Words to Say It series, which brings writers and poets to campus for reading. The event is free and open to the public.

Kenan, a native of New York, was raised in rural North Carolina and has focused his fiction on what it means to be black and gay in the South. He is the author of a novel, "A Visitation of Spirits"; two works of nonfiction, "Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century" and "The Fire This Time"; a young adult biography of James Baldwin; and a collection of stories, "Let the Dead Bury Their Dead," which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Among his awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the John Dos Passos Prize, a Whiting Writers' Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Prix de Rome. He is associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Following the reading, there will be a reception in the auditorium anteroom. Kenan's books will be available for sale and for signing.

For more information, call Coastal Carolina University English professor Dan Albergotti at 843-349-2420.