Margaret Randall's new collection, She Becomes Time, continues her legacy of poetry that combines the intimate with the global, history with feeling, memory with the world we touch and see, showing--always in surprising ways--how these impact and intersect each other. The book begins with a group of poems about her childhood, in which the poet reveals secrets and asks unexpected questions. It ends with breathtaking series about Mexico and Cuba, countries the poet knows well and which she takes on without any idealization.
Author Biography:
Margaret Randall is a feminist poet, writer, photographer and social activist. She is the author of over 100 books. Born in New York City in 1936, she has lived for extended periods in Albuquerque, New York, Seville, Mexico City, Havana, and Managua. Shorter stays in Peru and North Vietnam were also formative. In the 1960s, with Sergio Mondragón she founded and co-edited El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn, a bilingual literary journal which for eight years published some of the most dynamic and meaningful writing of an era. Robert Cohen took over when Mondragón left the publication in 1968. From 1984 through 1994 she taught at a number of U.S. universities. Randall was privileged to live among New York's abstract expressionists in the 1950s and early '60s, participate in the Mexican student movement of 1968, share important years of the Cuban revolution (1969-1980), the first four years of Nicaragua's Sandinista project (1980-1984), and visit North Vietnam during the heroic last months of the U.S. American war in that country (1974). Her four children—Gregory, Sarah, Ximena and Ana—have given her ten grandchildren and one great-grandchild. She has lived with her life companion, the painter and teacher Barbara Byers, for the past 29 years. Upon her return to the United States from Nicaragua in 1984, Randall was ordered to be deported when the government invoked the 1952 McCarran-Walter immigration and Nationality Act, judging opinions expressed in some of her books to be "against the good order and happiness of the United States." The Center for Constitutional Rights defended Randall, and many writers and others joined in an almost five-year battle for reinstatement of citizenship. She won her case in 1989. In 1990 Randall was awarded the Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett grant for writers victimized by political repression. In 2004 she was the first recipient of PEN New Mexico's Dorothy Doyle Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing and Human Rights Activism. Recent non-fiction books by Randall include To Change the World: My Life in Cuba (Rutgers University Press), More Than Things (University of Nebraska Press), Che On My Mind, and Haydée Santamaría, Cuban Revolutionary: She Led by Transgression (both from Duke University Press). ""The Unapologetic Life of Margaret Randall"" is an hour-long documentary by Minneapolis filmmakers Lu Lippold and Pam Colby. It is distributed by Cinema Guild in New York City. Randall's most recent collections of poetry and photographs are Their Backs to the Sea (2009) and My Town: A Memoir of Albuquerque, New Mexico (2010), As If the Empty Chair: Poems for the disappeared / Como si la silla vacía: Poemas para los desaparecidos (2011), Where Do We Go From Here? (2012), Daughter of Lady Jaguar Shark (2013), The Rhizome as a Field of Broken Bones (2013), and About Little Charlie Lindbergh and other Poems (2014), all published by Wings Press.
