Letters That Breathe Fire
El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn
by Margaret Randall
Arguably one of the most important independent literary magazines of the 1960s, El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn made new work from the South available in the North and vice versa. In these letters, arguments about important issues of the day also took place. Personal and political stories offer a sense of how creative people lived and worked, and those stories continue to have relevance in today’s very different world.
Published by New Village Press
Distributed by NYU Press
Publication Date: February 10, 2026
Pages: 384
Trim: 5.50 x 8.50 in
ISBN: 978-1-61332-283-3
Price: $25.00
Primary edition: paperback
Also available in ebook and hardcover
About Margaret Randall
Margaret Randall is a poet, writer, translator, photographer, and activist who has lived in New York, Mexico City, Havana, Managua, and Albuquerque. Her time in these places often coincided with major sociopolitical upheavals or pivotal historic moments. She edited El Corno Emplumado, an important bilingual literary magazine, for eight years out of Mexico City and has known some of the great minds of her generation. When she returned to the United States, the US government ordered her deported because of opinions expressed in some of her books, and she was forced to wage a five-year battle for restoration of citizenship.
“The pages of this book are a primer for the kind of politically transformative, international poetry community that you and I can build, dear reader. It’s right here, in these pages. It comes to us one issue and one letter at a time, each lovingly annotated by Margaret Randall, the cumulative power of whose years of editorial effort and poetic insight are here, too. We are lucky to have each other and this book.”
—Tim Johnson, Marfa Book Company
“As a poet, translator, and lifelong advocate who has known the material consequence of cultural defiance and opposition to government, Margaret Randall relates now the riveting and relevant story of a literary magazine that in its seven and a half years (1962-1969) enabled artistic kinships that radicalized the imagination and political solidarities between poets across the Americas. In an account that endures ‘to break down the barriers that separate us,’ Randall relates the practical day-to-day demands of editing, the emergent cultural internationalism of the 1960s, resistance to Cold War conformity, and the rise of civil rights activism and student protests in the U.S. and Latin America. Randall conveys those vibrant years in a bold intersection of testimony, history, and reporting, with the support of a chorus—a theater of memory rising from the past as preserved in El Corno Emplumado’s archive of letters from readers and contributors alike. These Letters That Breathe Fire are a vitality for our times.”
—Roberto Tejada, author of Mirrors for Gold and Carbonate of Copper.