Revolutionary Transgressions: an Interview With Margaret Randall
January 1, 2016
Revolutionary Transgressions: an Interview With Margaret Randall
by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Margaret Randall is a poet, essayist, oral historian, translator, photographer and social activist who was born and raised in New York City. She lived in Latin America for 23 years. In México from 1962 to 1969, she and Mexican poet Sergio Mondragón co-edited El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn, a bilingual literary quarterly that published some of the best new work of the sixties. She lived and worked in Cuba 1969 to 1981, then in Nicaragua until she returned to the United States in 1984, settling in Albuquerque. She spent the rest of the 1980s fighting a US government deportation order, 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 in 1989. Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, she taught at several universities, most often Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.
Randall’s most recent poetry titles include My Town, As if the Empty Chair/Como si la silla vacía; The Rhizome as a Field of Broken Bones; Daughter of Lady Jaguar Shark; and About Little Charlie Lindbergh, all from Wings Press in San Antonio. Two of her most recent books are from Duke Press: Che on My Mind (2013), which she calls a feminist poet’s reminiscence of Che Guevara, and Haydée Santamaría, Cuban Revolutionary: She Led by Transgression, published in 2015.
Margaret Randall lives in New Mexico with her partner (now wife) of 29 years, the painter Barbara Byers, and travels extensively to read, lecture and teach.
In this interview, Randall talks about her new book on Haydée Santamaría, about Che, about feminism, about her years living and raising her children in Cuba, about the draconian US immigration policies she experienced, and about the possible future of Cuba free of US boycott.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/01/01/revolutionary-transgressions-an-interview-with-margaret-randall/
