Night + Day

Gone to Look for America To find out what it means to be a black American now, author Randall Kenan decided to look beyond his own experience (as a black Southern writer) and hit the road. Kenan traveled cross-country for six years, conducting hundreds of interviews in Atlanta, Oakland, and Anchorage, and even in the Aryan Nation camp of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, looking for answers. The book that came of that long trip, Walking On Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century is part travelogue, part cultural analysis. Kenan, whose book Let the Dead Bury Their Dead was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, will talk about Walking On Water during an Intersection for the Arts residency that also includes a public interview with Bastard Out of Carolina author Dorothy Allison at 8 p.m. Wednesday. Tonight's discussion begins at 8 p.m. Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia (at 15th Street), S.F. Admission is $5-7; call 626-2787.