Julian Randall

Julian Randall is a Queer Black poet from Chicago. He is the author of Refuse (Pitt Poetry Series, 2018), which won the 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was a finalist for a 2019 NAACP Image Award. He is the author of The Dead Don’t Need Reminding: In Search of Fugitives, Mississippi and Black TV Nerd Shit (Bold Type Books, 2024) and the middle grade Pilar Ramirez novel duology (Penguin Random House, 2022), which was featured at the 2022 National Book Festival.

Randall has received fellowships from Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Callaloo, BOAAT, and the Watering Hole. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and the 2019 Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award from the Publishing Triangle. 

Randall’s writing has been published in The New York Times Magazine and Poetry. His work has been anthologized in Black Boy Joy, edited by Kwame Mbalia (Penguin Random House, 2023), which debuted in the number one spot on the NYT Best Sellers list, Wild Tongues Can’t Be Tamed, edited by Saraciea J. Fennell (Flatiron Books, 2021), and Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, edited by Lauren K. Alleyne (Northwestern University Press, 2019). 

His essays have been published in The Atlantic, Vibe Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, and others. Randall was a finalist for the 2022 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. 

He earned an MFA in poetry from University of Mississippi.