Winner of the 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Prize

Set against the backdrop of the Obama presidency, Julian Randall's Refuse documents a young biracial man's journey through the mythos of Blackness, Latinidad, family, sexuality and a hostile American landscape.  Mapping the relationship between father and son caught in a lineage of grief and inherited Black trauma, Randall conjures reflections from mythical figures such as Icarus, Narcissus and the absent Frank Ocean.  Not merely a story of the wound but the salve, Refuse  is a poetry debut that accepts that every song must end before walking confidently into the next music
 

Julian Randall is a Living Queer Black poet from Chicago. He has received fellowships from Callaloo, BOAAT, and The Watering Hole and was the 2015 National College Slam (CUPSI) Best Poet. Julian is the curator of Winter Tangerine Review’s Lineage of Mirrors. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as New York Times Magazine, The Georgia Review, and Sixth Finch and in the anthologies Portrait in Blues, Nepantla, and New Poetry from the Midwest. He is a candidate for his MFA in Poetry at Ole Miss.
 

"Julian Randall’s hard-hitting debut is a dispatch straight from the crosshairs of Chump’s Amerikkka.  In poems that are raw, urgent, and formally dexterous, Randall testifies against a state that would just as soon see him dead as silenced.  And in the tradition of such culture warriors as Audre Lorde and Larry Neal, Randall refuses the muzzle and the machine.  In these perilous times, we need a poet of such vision and courage, ojos y corazon, as Randall, who ‘looks beyond the window . . . and beneath the snow imagines an entire country; beneath that country, another.'" —John Murillo