Living, Queer, Black, Author: Julian Randall '11

Alumni Office (A): Can you introduce yourself and what you’ve been doing since graduating from Breck?

Julian Randall ’11 (J): I'm Julian Randall, class of 2011, and I am a full-time author – mostly for children, but this time for adults. 

A: What have you been doing since graduating from Breck?

J: After I graduated from Breck, I ended up going to Swarthmore College and after I graduated in 2016, I went off to the University of Mississippi to get my MFA in poetry. After that, I was back in the Twin Cities for about a year on fellowship. During the pandemic, I moved back to my hometown in Chicago, Logan Square, and now I live out on the west side of Chicago. It's been a really wonderful time, and I've been working on my novel series for young people, Pilar Ramirez. I toured for my poetry book, Refuse, which Breck has been kind enough to even have a couple of students do papers on, which was a wonderful and deeply surreal experience. And then in the fall, I have one more middle-grade novel coming out called The Chain Breakers, but the book that we're here to talk about today is called The Dead Don’t Need Reminding: In Search of Fugitives, Mississippi and Black TV Nerd Sh*t.

A: Can you tell us what inspired you to write this book?

J: I am a huge fan of the writings of Kiese Laymon, Hanif Abdurraqib, Vievee Francis and just a wide range of other folks. Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward was a huge influence as I was moving through grad school. As I was working with Kiese, he started to encourage me to try a couple of other genres. What I loved most was trying to take that moment of encounter, that magic when the concert starts, or your favorite song is playing. When you see somebody who is, up until that moment, a stranger, knowing that they know this song makes you know each other just a little bit more. To me, that's the wonder of what Kiese can do, what nonfiction can do – take these deeply private moments that art allows to become very public connections. [My inspiration was] to do that and to set it against the backdrop of me trying to find not only a reason to survive but also trying to find the records of my great-grandfather who escaped Mississippi on the back of some truly wild racial experiences.

It sounds like it's a book about everything, but realistically, it's a book about pop culture and about Mississippi. It takes place across 18 essays and 135 miles from Oxford, Mississippi, where I was doing my MFA, to Greenville, Mississippi, and to the baby that became my grandmother.

A: Can you share some of the most memorable moments in your career?

J: I ended up being the second youngest person to ever win the Cave Canem prize around the time my first book came out, which was an incredible moment. I feel very lucky to have always come from environments, whether they were my neighborhood or my school, that were really heavy on how community feeds into what we want to do. I would not have been able to win that prize without the help of my community. So, to be able to tell the people who helped lift me up, who encouraged me, who believed in me, who held me accountable to be more daring with what I had to say – those are all things that I feel really grateful and really proud of. That got me to the NAACP image Awards. That was a surreal and wondrous weekend. I've gotten the chance to go all over the country, all over the world, and read things that help kids feel a little less alone and a little more like they are all the power that they've ever needed. It's kind of hard to zone in a single moment, but it's definitely a long train of small gratitudes.

A: Can you share about being a queer black author and how those communities have inspired you? And now that you're creating work, what kind of a legacy do you want to create to give back or to invest in those communities?

J: I think that being a queer black author means that you are not only part of a history, but a living history. That's part of why I always designate in my bio that I am a living queer black author because there are so many opportunities and times where having good conversations about teaching diverse books and making sure that those diverse histories are connected to diverse presences is really crucial. And today, that's kind of the core of all of my middle-grade books. I tell the kids all the time that what motivates me is the question of what if all of our lost ones aren’t lost to us.

In the context of Pilar, Pilar is dealing with a mystical world in a Dominican fantasy after her cousin disappeared 50 years ago during the Trujillo regime which dominated the Dominican Republic during my Abuelo’s time. With The Chain Breakers, we have this question of, “What if the souls that were lost during the Middle Passage made a new home beneath the waves? What if there were grim reapers who were sworn to protect them? What if all of them came together to save each other?”

All those are ways that we can queer the history, all of those are ways that these are continuations of the works of people like Samiya Bashir, like James Baldwin. In terms of Audre Lorde, this idea that our history are things that affect us and that we deserve to carry them into the room. But our histories do not dominate us. They don't define us. They give us a starting point of which to push through. I think that's what the intersection of queerness and blackness in history that many have attempted to kill, but has never died.

A: Can you share a few lessons that you learned at Breck that you use today in your career?

J: I tell this story all the time. When I was a senior, I was about to give my independent study model. I'm walking, pacing outside the dressing room, and Mr. Hegg comes over and says, “How are you feeling?” I said I was nervous. And he said, “Great!” And I was like, “What are you talking about? This is bad!” He said, “No. Never confuse the difference between nerves and fear. Nerves are what signals that you care about something.” I think that framework gives you so much in terms of distinguishing one emotion from another. To be able to tell that in a way that was effective and helpful to a teenager is just such a testament to what a master teacher he was. Mr. Moos was also forever a huge influence. He was somebody who believed that I had something to say and that I would find my way towards saying it. When we were doing the tour for Refuse, and I was back visiting Minnesota for an event, he came. After all those years, our strong bands will never be broken.

 

Julian currently lives in Chicago. The Dead Don’t Need Reminding: In Search of Fugitives, Mississippi and Black TV Nerd Sh*t is out now. You can check out his other work at https://juliandavidrandall.com/work.