Julia Randall (June 15, 1923–May 22, 2005) was an American poet, professor, and environmental activist; recipient of many honors for her poetry, she published seven books of poetry culminating in The Path to Fairview: New and Selected Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 1992). Described as “one of America's purest and most original lyric poets” (Ploughshares, Spring 2009, Vol. 35, No.1), her honors include the Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America (1980), the Poets’ Prize (1988) for her book Moving in Memory, as well as grants from the National Endowment of the Arts (1966, 1982) and the National Institute of Arts & Letters (1968), and a Sewanee Review Fellowship (1957). Biography Early Years and Education Julia Randall was born June 15, 1923 in Baltimore, MD. She attended Calvert School, and later Bryn Mawr School, graduating in 1941; in 1945 she received a B.A. in English from Bennington College in Vermont. After a year of medical school, a job as technician at the Harvard Biological Laboratory, she returned to Baltimore, poetry and an M.A. (1950) from Johns Hopkins University. Personal life and academic career In 1952 she married Kenneth Sawyer, art critic for the Baltimore Sun and the Paris Tribune; they divorced in 1962. She taught at the evening school of the Johns Hopkins University (1950–1952), the Paris Branch of the University of Maryland (1952–1953), the Peabody Conservatory (1957–58), and Towson State (1958–1962). In 1962 she joined the English faculty at Hollins College, serving first as an Assistant Professor, and from 1966 as Associate Professor, teaching there for eleven years before retiring to write full-time. She was the only woman member of the English Department; among her students were notable writers Lee Smith and Annie Dillard, for whom Randall was an important model as teacher, and, in Dillard's words, as a “woman who has committed her life to her art” (quoted by Nancy Parrish in Lee Smith, Annie Dillard and the Hollins Group, LSU, 1999). During those years, she wrote reviews for the Baltimore Evening Sun and the Hollins Critic, published the first four of her seven books of poetry, won her first National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1966), a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant (1968), and, already a revered poet in Baltimore, was gaining national recognition. As U.S. Poet Laureate Howard Nemerov wrote of her 1965 book, The Puritan Carpenter: “I had been getting glumly