That’s how you and I got here, because we were in the same group. So the first week that I was back in Minnesota, because that’s where I graduated high school, that fellowship, that kind of loyalty that runs deep, that all trickles down from the veteran leadership that they got there, but they’re always looking to incorporate newer voices. Kate Kysar, she met me, didn’t know me from Adam at that moment in time, but I ended up catching the Milkweed Fellowship and she let me stay at her house for, like, a week while I was getting on my feet and actually allowed to move into my space and all that good stuff. And I never felt that while I was in the space. But I think that it was a wonderful experience in that, insofar as, I think that writing spaces, and especially like writing retreats, often have these generational divides that make it difficult for folks to talk to each other and that can lead to the sustainability of the space being endangered. It was the last writing conference where I got to go to that I could still hug people, so there was definitely that. What was your experience at MNWC? How did attending the conference impact your writing journey?
It can look a lot of different ways, but realistically it’s just about making sure that when people pass through that they feel like they were seen and they continue to be seen even as they fade into the distance. When you look at opportunities to see like, “Oh, my gosh, who has passed through this space before?” There’s a way that it can get real name-droppy, but I think that in its best format it means that the conference has an investment in each of the writers who pass through its gates and they just want to make sure that everybody knows like, “hey this person came through here and we’re going to keep lifting them up and supporting their work.” Like I love seeing how MNWC just be like, retweeting, and sending along alumni newsletters.
I think that one of the things that I really grew up loving was alumni pages. What qualities do you look for when applying to writing conferences? Q&A (Note: Edited and condensed for clarity) He is the author of Refuse (Pitt, 2018), winner of the 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and a finalist for a 2019 NAACP Image Award, as well as the middle grade novel Pilar Ramirez And The Escape from Zafa (Holt, Winter 2022), and The Dead Don’ t Need Reminding: Essays (Bold Type Books, Spring 2023). He has essays in The Atlantic, Vibe Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, and other venues. His writing has been published in New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, and POETRY, and anthologized in Black Boy Joy (which debuted at #1 on the NYT Best Seller list), Wild Tongues Can’ t Be Tamed and Furious Flower. Julian is the winner of the 2019 Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award from the Publishing Triangle. Julian is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Callaloo, BOAAT and the Watering Hole. Julian Randall is a Living Queer Black poet from Chicago.