Margaret Randall

The legendary author Margaret Randall will read from her new works, The Calendar’s Whim (poems) and Pages Lost and New (essays).

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). From 1962 to 1969 she and Mexican poet Sergio Mondragón co-edited El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn, a bilingual literary quarterly that published more than 700 writers and visual artists from 35 countries: 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, and her citizenship was restored in 1989.

Randall’s most recent poetry collections include Stormclouds Like Unkept Promises, Vertigo of Risk, Home, and Wild Card (Casa Urraca Press) and This Honest Land (Wings Press). Che on My Mind (a feminist poet’s reminiscence of Che Guevara, published by Duke University Press), Thinking About Thinking (Casa Urraca), My Life in 100 Objects, Artists in My Life, Luck (New Village Press), and Last Words (Casa Urraca) are recent titles. In 2020 Duke published her memoir, I Never Left Home: Poet, Feminist, Revolutionary. A second volume of selected poems, Time’s Language II: Poems 2019-2023, from Wings Press, followed Time’s Language: Poems 1959-2018 as compendiums of her best work in that genre. 

Her most recent projects have been two books based on her correspondence with people she calls outriders, creatives who have faced serious obstacles but have pushed through them to make and do. Letters from the Edge was released by New Village Press in April 2025, and More Letters from the Edge in the fall of that year.

Many of Randall’s titles have appeared in Spanish translation from Siglo XXI, Alforja, Ediciones de Medianoche, and Heredad in Mexico; Casa de las Américas, Ediciones Matanzas, and Vigía in Cuba; Abisinia and Tinta Limón in Argentina, Rumbo in Uruguay, and independent publishers in Nicaragua, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Spain, Holland, Japan, Turkey, and India.

Margaret also translates from the Spanish. She has produced English-language poetry collections by Roberto Fernández Retamar, Roque Dalton, Otto-René Castillo, Carlos María Gutiérrez, Daisy Zamora, Kelly Martínez, Israel Domínguez, Alfredo Zaldívar, Laura Ruíz, Chely Lima, Rita Valdivia, Reynaldo García Blanco, Yanira Marimón, and Gaudencio Rodríguez Santana, among others; novels by Freddy Prestol Castillo, Juan Antonio Hernández, and Tomás Modesto Galán; memoirs by Gregory Randall, Lurgio Gavilán Sánchez, and Stefano Varese; and anthologies of Cuban poetry and short stories, Ecuadorean poetry, US poets for Mexico, and Beat Poets in Spanish. She has read her own work and delivered keynote addresses in hundreds of venues throughout the United States, Latin America, and other countries. 

Two of Randall’s photographs are in the Capitol Art Collection in Santa Fe. In 1960 Randall was a recipient of a Carnegie Fund for Writers Aid Grant, and in 1960 a grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters revolving fund for writers in need. In 1989 she was a co-winner of the Mencken Award and in 1990 she received a Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett grant for writers victimized by political repression. The Barbara Deming Money for Women Award was given to her in 1997, and in 2004 she received the PEN New Mexico Dorothy Doyle Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing and Human Rights Activism. Randall received the 2017 Medalla al Mérito Literario from Literatura en el Bravo, Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. In 2018 she was awarded the “Poet of two Hemispheres” prize by Poesía en Paralelo Cero in Quito, Ecuador. In 2019 she earned an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of New Mexico. In 2020 she received the George Garrett Award from the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) and the Paulo Freire Award from Chapman University. In 2022 she received the City of Albuquerque’s Creative Bravo Award. Randall lives in Albuquerque with her partner (now wife) of 39 years, the painter Barbara Byers, and travels extensively to read, lecture and teach.

Randall’s books will be available for purchase at this event thanks to Casa Urraca Press! Visit casaurracapress.com.

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