Today’s guest is Julian Randall, a poet, essayist, educator, and the author of Refuse, a collection that explores family, race, masculinity, illness, inheritance, and the complicated ways we learn who we’re supposed to be. His work has appeared in Poetry, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and many other publications, and he serves as an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago.
What draws me to Julian’s work is its refusal to flatten experience into certainty. His poems are deeply attentive to contradiction — to the ways tenderness and anger, grief and joy, vulnerability and strength can occupy the same body, the same family, the same moment. Rather than resolving those tensions, he invites us to live inside them.
That feels deeply connected to what we explore on this podcast. Queering reality isn’t simply about sexuality or gender — it’s about resisting the pressure to make ourselves legible through binaries. It’s about questioning the stories we’ve inherited about what makes a family, what makes a man, what makes a body, what makes a life. Julian’s work reminds us that identity isn’t something we arrive at once and for all; it’s something we continually negotiate with memory, history, love, and loss.
I’m especially excited to talk with him about poetry as a way of holding complexity without rushing toward resolution, about inheritance and the stories families pass down and leave unsaid, about vulnerability as a creative practice, and about what becomes possible when we allow ourselves to be more than one thing at once.
