News Release

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UNC creative writers Simpson, Kenan 
receive state’s highest civilian honor

CHAPEL HILL — Bland Simpson and Randall Kenan, creative writing faculty members in the English department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, were presented with North Carolina Awards, the state’s highest civilian honor, by Gov. Mike Easley today (Nov. 21).

The awards, coordinated by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, recognize outstanding lifetime achievements by North Carolinians in the fields of fine arts, science, literature and public service.

Simpson, who directs the creative writing program in UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences, received the award in the fine arts category. Kenan received the award for literature.

November has been a winning month for UNC’s creative writing faculty. Alan Shapiro and Lawrence Naumoff also won top state prizes recently when they received North Carolina Book Awards.

The North Carolina Literary and Historical Association, which administers the awards, presented the Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry to Shapiro and the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction to Naumoff.

Simpson, a teacher in the program since 1982, has written books including "Heart of the Country: A Novel of Southern Music," "The Great Dismal: A Carolinian’s Swamp Memoir," "The Mystery of Beautiful Nell Cropsey: A Nonfiction Novel," "Into the Sound Country: A Carolinian’s Coastal Plain" and "Ghost Ship of Diamond Shoals: The Mystery of the Carroll A. Deering."

Since 1986, Simpson has been a member of the Tony Award-winning string band The Red Clay Ramblers. He also has collaborated on musicals including "King Mackerel and The Blues are Running," "Kudzu: A Southern Musical," "Diamond Studs" and the three-time Broadway hit "Fool Moon."

In 1999, he received the Conservation Communicator of the Year Award from the N.C. Wildlife Federation and the N.C. Folklore Society’s Brown-Hudson Award for writing and music.

Kenan’s 1992 collection of stories, "Let the Dead Bury Their Dead," won a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction in 1993 from the national nonprofit Lambda Literary Foundation, which promotes gay and lesbian literature.

The collection also was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and among The New York Times Notable Books. His book "Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century," was nominated for the Southern Book Award in 1999.

From 1985 to 1989, Kenan worked on the editorial staff of the publishing company Alfred A. Knopf Inc. He has taught writing at Sarah Lawrence and Vassar colleges, Columbia and Duke universities, the University of Mississippi at Oxford and the University of Memphis.

Kenan has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Writers’ Award for emerging writers of talent and promise, given annually by the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation of New York; a Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award for developing writers; and the John Dos Passos Award for Literature. The American Academy of Arts and Letters honored Kenan with its 1997 Rome Prize.

Previous recipients of North Carolina Awards, given annually since 1964, include the late humanitarian John Motley Morehead, scientist Clyde Hutchison, writer Maya Angelou, businessman and preservationist Richard Jenrette and singer James Taylor. For more information, visit www.ncculture.com. 

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Photo URLs: http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/faculty/simpson_bland.jpg
http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/faculty/randall_kenan.jpg  

Note: For embargoed information about all 2005 North Carolina Award winners, consult an earlier news release, also embargoed, from the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources.

Photo opportunity: The North Carolina Awards will be presented at 7 p.m. Monday (Nov. 21) at the Sheraton Imperial in Research Triangle Park. Please call (919) 807-7389 or (919) 807-7385 for information about a 5:15 p.m. photo opportunity with award recipients. The dinner and ceremony require tickets.

For more information on Naumoff and Shapiro, read the Nov. 11 UNC news release posted at http://www.unc.edu/news/archives/nov05/naushap111105.htm.

N.C. Department of Cultural Resources contact: Fay Mitchell Henderson, (919) 807-7389, fay.henderson@ncmail.net
College of Arts and Sciences contact: Kim Weaver Spurr, (919) 962-4093, spurrk@email.unc.edu