Julian Randall

Julian Randall is a queer poet and writer from Chicago. He earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Mississippi. Randall is the author of one book of poetry, Refuse (2018), winner of the 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and a finalist for a 2019 NAACP Image Award. He is also the author of the YA novel Pilar Ramirez and the Escape from Zafa (2022), which was featured at the 2022 National Book Festival.

Randall’s poetry has been published in the New York Times, Ploughshares, Poetry, the Georgia Review, and elsewhere. His work appears in anthologies including Black Boy Joy, Wild Tongues Can’t Be Tamed, and Furious Flower. His essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Vibe, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. 

Randall is a finalist for the 2022 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Callaloo, Milkweed Editions, BOAAT, and The Watering Hole. Some honors and awards include recognition as the 2015 National College Slam (CUPSI) Best Poet, a Pushcart Prize, the 2019 Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award from the Publishing Triangle, the 2019 Frederick Bock Prize, and recognition as a 2019 Tin House Scholar.