Video | Randall Statement to Stop FBI Commitee
Margaret Randall, poet, essayist, historian, teacher, radical activist, mother and grandmother, addresses comments to the people raided by the FBI on September 24, 2010 and the others who were served with Chicago Grand Jury subpoenas.
About Margaret Randall (© 2011 MargaretRandall.org)
Margaret Randall is a feminist poet, writer, photographer and social activist. 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 turbulent 1960s she co-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. From 1984 through 1994 she taught at a number of U.S. universities.
Margaret 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: Lia, Martin, Daniel, Richi, Sebastian, Juan, Luis Rodrigo, Mariana, Eli, and Tolo. She has lived with her life companion, the painter and teacher Barbara Byers, for almost a quarter century.
Among Margaret’s more than 80 published books, some titles still in print are CUBAN WOMEN NOW, SANDINO’S DAUGHTERS, SANDINO’S DAUGHTER REVISITED, CHRISTIANS IN THE NICARAGUAN REVOLUTION, RISKING A SOMERSAULT IN THE AIR, THE SHAPE OF RED (with Ruth Hubbard), DANCING WITH THE DOE, THIS IS ABOUT INCEST, WALKING TO THE EDGE: ESSAYS OF RESISTANCE, HUNGER’S TABLE: WOMEN, POLITICS & FOOD, THE PRICE YOU PAY: THE HIDDEN COST OF WOMEN’S RELATIONSHIP TO MONEY, WHEN I LOOK INTO THE MIRROR AND SEE YOU: WOMEN, TERROR & RESISTANCE, NARRATIVE OF POWER: ESSAYS FOR AN ENDANGERED CENTURY, WHERE THEY LEFT YOU FOR DEAD / HALFWAY HOME, INTO ANOTHER TIME: GRAND CANYON REFLECTIONS, STONES WITNESS, TO CHANGE THE WORLD: MY YEARS IN CUBA, THEIR BACKS TO THE SEA and MY TOWN. AS IF THE EMPTY CHAIR / COMO SI LA SILLA VACIA (bilingual poetry, Wings Press) and FIRST LAUGH (essays, University of Nebraska Press) will be out in Spring 2011, RUINS (poems, University of New Mexico Press) and SOMETHING’S WRONG WITH THE CORNFIELDS (poems, Skylight Press) in Fall, 2011. Ask for them at your local bookstore, or order through Amazon.com.
In 1984, Margaret came home to the United States, only to be ordered 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 her and many writers and others joined in an almost five-year battle for reinstatement of citizenship. She 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 Dorothy Doyle Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing and Human Rights Activism. In 2009 two of her photographs were accepted into the Capitol Arts Foundation permanent collection of work by New Mexican artists on display at the State capitol.
“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: Cinema Guild Click on the link, then search alphabetically among the many other exciting selections. You will find both sale and rental prices, as well as order information. This web site also has links to this film, as well as to “El Corno Emplumado: A History of the Sixties,” about the journal Randall co-founded and edited from Mexico City. CDs of her reading her poetry can be ordered from Randall herself.