Julia Randall (Sawyer) Papers

Julia Randall was born on June 15, 1923 in Baltimore, Maryland, to Mr. and Mrs. Richard H. Randall. She attended both Calvert School and Bryn Mawr School, and graduated with a B.A. in English from Bennington College in 1945. Randall first went into medicine, studying at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, but returned to her undergraduate interest in English. She studied at Harvard, but returned to Johns Hopkins to complete her degree (M.A. 1950). In 1952, she married Kenneth Sawyer, a poet and art critic who wrote for the Paris Tribune and the Baltimore Sun; they divorced in 1962.

Julia taught at Johns Hopkins University from 1950 to 1952, the Paris branch of the University of Maryland from 1952 to 1953, the Peabody Conservatory from 1957 to 1958, and the Towson State Teachers College from 1958 to 1962. She also worked as a library assistant at Goucher College from 1954 to 1956. In 1962 she became an associate professor of English at Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia, where she stayed for the next eleven years before retiring from teaching to write full time. While at Hollins she was the only female member of the English department and future authors such as Annie Dillard and Lee Smith among her students. According to Nancy Parrish, in Lee Smith, Annie Dillard, and the Hollins Group, “Julia Randall Sawyer was an important model for the women of the Hollins Group, and for Annie Doak Dillard in particular because she was a ‘woman who has committed her life to her art.’”

Under her maiden name of Julia Randall, she published eight collections of poetry from 1952 to 1992, and was included in Contemporary Southern Poetry: An Anthology in 1979. As a poet, she is most often associated with Baltimore, Maryland. She also wrote literary reviews regularly for the Baltimore Evening Sun and the Hollins Critic. In 1987 she received the Poet’s Prize for Moving in Memory and in both 1966 and 1982 she received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. In 1980 she received the American Poetry Society’s Percy Bysshe Shelley Award.

After her retirement in 1973 Randall moved to Baltimore, Maryland. Her post-teaching years are marked with efforts in environmental activism, especially pertaining to the Long Green Valley in Baltimore County. Some of the land she campaigned for has been protected by preservation ordinances. Much of her writing reflects these environmental themes.

Randall moved from her native Baltimore to North Bennington, Vermont in 1987 where she remained until her death. On May 22, 2005, Randall died from heart disease, at the age of 81.