Margaret Randall
Margaret Randall (1936–) is a poet, essayist, photographer, and revolutionary. She is associated with New York’s abstract expressionists and the Beat Movement, revolutionary histories in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua, and a famous case of political deportation in 1984-89.
She has been honored with the Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett grant for writers victimized by political repression, the PEN New Mexico’s Dorothy Doyle Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing and Human Rights Activism, the Medal for Literary Merit by Literatura en el Bravo, the Poet of Two Hemispheres Prize, and the 2020 George Garrett Award given by AWP. She is the author of over 200 titles, the most recent of which are Letters from the Edge (New Village Press, 2025), My Life in 100 Objects (New Village Press, 2020); Artists in My Life (New Village Press, 2022); Risking a Somersault in the Air: Conversations with Nicaraguan Writers (New Village Press, 2022); and Luck (New Village Press, 2023).
Randall has lived in New York City, Seville, Mexico City, Havana, and Managua with formative stays in Peru and North Vietnam. She currently lives with her wife, painter and teacher Barbara Byers, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her portrait and landscape photography collection is kept in the University of New Mexico’s Center for Southwest Research and Special Collections.