Margaret Randall Note (VMF135)
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Administrative/Biographical History
Margaret Randall (1936 - ) is a feminist poet, writer, photographer and social activist with more than 80 published books. Born in New York City, Randall spent much of her youth in Albuquerque, New Mexico. After a year at the University of New Mexico, she spent time in Spain and in New York City. In 1960, Randall moved to Mexico City and from 1962-1969 co-founded and co-edited El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn, a bilingual literary journal bridging the cultures of North America and Latin America. While in Mexico, Randall married her second husband, Sergio Mondragón and she became a Mexican citizen. In 1969, she divorced and moved with Robert Cohen to Cuba until 1980. After working for the Cuban Book Institute for a number of years, she began work as a free-lance journalist, photographer, and oral historian, specializing in the struggles of women in Cuba, Nicaragua, Peru and Vietnam. In 1980, she continued this work while living in Nicaragua with her youngest two daughters.
In 1984, Randall moved back to Albuquerque where she taught Women's Studies and American Studies at the University of New Mexico. Randall was denied permanent residence in the United States in 1985 citing the McCarran-Walter Act, which denied citizenship to those thought to be subversive and could charge individuals who had either been members of the Communist Party or even those who were deemed supporters of communism. After a long legal fight with the help of the Center for Constitutional Rights, in 1989 it was decided that she had not relinquished her citizenship while in Mexico, and therefore, was still a citizen of the United States.
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.
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Originally laid in Getting Rid of Blue Plastic by Margaret Randall. PS3535 A56277 G4 1968
Accession number 1358
