Randall Kenan, the author whose work chronicled the experience of Black gay people in the southern U.S., has died at 57, the Raleigh [N.C.] News Observer reports.

Kenan’s death comes less than a month after the publication of his latest book, the short story collection If I Had Two Wings. A reviewer for Kirkus described the book as “artful stories [that] conjure contemporary North Carolina, mouthwatering and matter-of-factly haunted.”

Kenan was born in Brooklyn but moved with his family to rural Wallace, N.C., as a child. He worked at the publisher Alfred A. Knopf for years before publishing his first book, the novel A Visitation of Spirits, in 1989.

Three years later, he published the short story collection Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, which was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books include a biography of James Baldwin for young readers and a nonfiction book titled Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century.

Admirers of Kenan paid tribute to the author on Twitter. Author Eric Darnell Pritchard wrote, “His glorious writing was among works that changed course of my work toward Black gay literature culture, an area I didn’t even know existed in as fruitful a way as it does until that time.”

And poet and memoirist Saeed Jones tweeted, “Randall Kenan’s work has always meant a lot to me. He was Black, gay, southern and BRILLIANT. I’m so sorry to hear that he’s passed.”

Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.