Julia Randall

Poet Julia Randall was born in Baltimore, Maryland. She studied English at Bennington College and medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine before earning an MA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. She published seven collections of poetry in her lifetime: The Solstice Tree (1952), Mimic August (1960), The Puritan Carpenter (1965), Adam’s Dream (1969), The Farewells (1981), Moving in Memory (1987), and The Path to Fairview (1992).

Randall’s poetry is often described in terms of its technical prowess and formal assurance. Critic Meg Schoerke alleged that “Randall succeeds in being both traditional and radically antitraditional in her poetry,” and poet Eleanor Wilner has described Randall’s form as “free verse [that] has a long training of the ear behind it, and her cadenced, contrapuntal music is all the livelier for being free to play without fixed constraints.”

An instructor at Goucher College, Towson University, and the Peabody Conservatory, among other places, Randall retired from Hollins College in 1973 and moved to Glen Arm, Maryland. In Maryland, she was an environmental activist working for the protection of the Long Green Valley. She moved to Vermont in 1987, where she lived until her death.