Margaret Randall

Margaret Randall (b. 1936, New York) is a poet, essayist, oral historian, translator, photographer, and social activist. She lived in Latin America for twenty-three years (in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua). From 1962 to 1969 she and Mexican poet Sergio Mondragón co-edited El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn, a bilingual literary quarterly that published some of the best new work of the sixties. When she came home in 1984, the government ordered her deported because it found some of her writing to be “against the good order and happiness of the United States.” With the support of many writers and others, she won her case in 1989. Randall’s most recent poetry titles include As If the Empty Chair / Como si la silla vacia, The Rhizome as a Field of Broken Bones, About Little Charlie Lindbergh, and She Becomes Time (all from Wings Press). Haydée Santamaría, Cuban Revolutionary: She Led By Transgression (2015) and Exporting Revolution: Cuba’s Global Solidarity (2017) were published by Duke. Randall has also devoted herself to translation, producing When Rains Become Floods, by Lurgio Galván Sánchez, and Only the Road / Solo el Camino, an anthology of eight decades of Cuban poetry (both also published by Duke). Randall lives in New Mexico with her partner (now wife) of more than thirty years, the painter Barbara Byers, and travels extensively to read, lecture, and teach.

  • October 3, 2017 Rita Valdivia
    Mural in Cochabamba, Bolivia / Photo by proyecto mARTadero For more on the poetry of Valdivia, read the companion essay by Margaret Randall.   Aullido poema octogonal En el graznido de mi…