" "I stroke your guarded back, touch your head
beneath tense crown of hair, gentle you to sleep." "

A Portrait of Poet Margaret Randall

(Photo credit: www.nmt.edu)

To Hear Audio

FI 073; KP 310; JG/ 087B

MP3

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Margaret Randall

Randall is a feminist poet, photographer, writer and social activist. She was born in New York City in 1936 and later moved to Albuquerque. In her mid-twenties she moved to Mexico. For the next 23 years she was immersed in women's struggles in Mexico, Cuba and Nicaragua. Between 1955 and 1984, Randall participated 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 visited North Vietnam during the heroic last months of the U.S. American war in that country (1974). Randall also worked as a midwife, freelance journalist, oral historian, translated prose and poetry and, in the 1960s, was cofounder and editor of a bilingual literary journal called "El Como Emplumado" that published some of the most dynamic and meaningful writing of the time.

In 1984, Margaret returned to the US, only to be ordered deported when the government invoked the 1952 McCarran-Walter Immigration and Nationality Act, ruling that her opinions were "against the good order and happiness of the United States." The Center for Constitutional Rights defended her in an almost five-year battle for reinstatement of her citizenship. She finally won her case in 1989. In 1990 she was awarded the Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett grant for writers victimized by political repression; and in 2004 was the first recipient of PEN New Mexico’s Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing and Human Rights Activism.

Randall has written more than sixty books in her lifetime, including "Hunger's Table Women, Food and Politics," "Gathering Rage," "The Failure of 20th Century Revolutions to Develop a Feminist Agenda," "Sandino's Daughters" and "Sandino's Daughter's Revisited."

For more information:

Margaret Randal Online
The University of New Mexico, University Libraries, Center for Southwest Research, The Margaret Randall Papers