Time's Language II

Margaret Randall (New York, 1936) is a poet, essayist, oral historian, translator, photographer, and social activist. She lived in Latin America for 23 years (in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua). With Mexican poet Sergio Mondragó n she founded, and from 1962 to 1969 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 The Center for Constitutional Rights as well as many writers and others, she won her case, and her citizenship was restored in 1989. Randall's most recent poetry titles include Against Atrocity, Out of Violence into Poetry (both from Wings Press), Stormclouds Like Unkept Promises, Vertigo of Risk, and Home (all from Casa Urraca Press). Among other recent titles are Haydé e Santamarí a: She Led by Transgression and Che on My Mind (a feminist poet's reminiscence of Che Guevara (both from Duke University Press), Thinking about Thinking (essays, from Casa Urraca), and My Life in 100 Objects, Artists in My Life, and Luck (all from New Village Press). Your Answer is Your Map is a " bus-ticket" or broadside published by Bob & Susan Arnold's Longhouse in Summer 2023. In 2020 Duke published her memoir, I Never Left Home: Poet, Feminist, Revolutionary. Two of Randall's photographs are in the Capitol Art Collection in Santa Fe. She has also devoted herself to translation, producing The Oval Portrait, Contemporary Cuban Women Writers and Artists by Soleida Rí os, When Rains Become Floods by Lurgio Galvá n Sá nchez, You Can Cross the Massacre on Foot by Freddy Prestol Castillo, The Art of Memory: An Ethnographer's Journey by Stefano Varese, Dictated by Fire / Lo que el fuego dictó by Juan Antonio Herná ndez, and Only the Road / Solo el camino, an anthology of eight decades of Cuban poetry, among many other titles. Randall received the 2017 Medalla al Mé rito Literario from Literatura en el Bravo, Ciudad Juá rez, Mexico. In 2018 she was awarded the " Poet of two Hemispheres" prize by Poesí a en Paralelo Cero in Quito, Ecuador. Cuba's Casa de las Amé ricas awarded her its prestigious Haydé e Santamarí a medal in 2019. In 2019 she was awarded an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of New Mexico and in 2022 she received the City of Albuquerque's Creative Bravo Award. Randall lives in Albuquerque with her wife of more than 36 years, the painter Barbara Byers, and travels extensively to read, lecture and teach.