The UAB Writers Series will present a free, public reading by novelist and essayist Randall Kenan at 4 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 5, at the UAB Spencer Honors House. Call the UAB Department of English at 934-4250 for more details.

Kenan's latest work is "The Fire This Time," which was published in 2007. His 1992 collection of stories, "Let the Dead Bury the Dead," was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was among the New York Times Notable Books of 1992. His first novel, "A Visitation of Spirits," was published in 1989.

Kenan has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Writers Award, the Sherwood Anderson Award and the John Dos Passos Award. He is an associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.