

She’s attending the National Baptist Convention.

In “When We All Get to Heaven,” Ed Phelps has accompanied his wife, Isaline, on a trip from Tims Creek to New York City. These characters are immersed in unlikely situations made realistic by an inherent verisimilitude of this imagined space in the South and all the concomitant social, cultural and racial concerns Kenan treated so effectively.

For the new collection, "If I Had Two Wings," we are back there again - as are some of his earlier characters from previous works. In two previous books - the novel "A Visitation of Spirits" and the collection "Let the Dead Bury Their Dead" - he created the fictional town of Tims Creek, North Carolina. On the heels of that came the shocking news of Randall Kenan’s death on August 28 at the age of 57. It was only last month that we could finally read the stories in the long-awaited collection “If I Had Two Wings” by Randall Kenan.
