Author Archives | Margaret Randall
Margaret Randall (1936) was born in New York City but grew up in Albuquerque and lived half of her adult life in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua. When she returned to the U.S. in 1984 she was ordered deported under the U.S. Immigration and Nationality's McCarran-Walter Act. The government alleged that her writings, "went against the good order and happiness of the United States." She won her case in 1989.
She is a local poet who reads nationally and internationally. Among her recent books of poetry are My Town, As If The Empty Chair / Como Si La Silla Vacia, and The Rhizome As A Field of Broken Bones, all from Wings Press, San Antonio, Texas. A feminist poet's reminiscence of Che Guevara, Che On My Mind, is just out from Duke University Press, a new collection of essays, More Than Things, is out from The University of Nebraska Press, and Daughter of Lady Jaguar Shark, a single long-poem with 15 photographs, is now available from Wings. Her most recent poetry collection is About Little Charlie Lindbergh (also from Wings Press).
Randall resides in Albuquerque with her partner, the painter Barbara Byers, and travels widely to read and lecture. You can find out more about Margaret, her writings and upcoming readings at, www.margaretrandall.org.
Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil
I wish I had gotten it together to write this while “Hannah Arendt” was still playing at The Guild, our city’s only remaining and consistently heroic arts theater. Then I could have urged anyone who hadn’t yet seen it to do so. Unfortunately, this brilliant film is no longer being shown. Perhaps popular demand might bring it back. “Hannah Arendt,” even for those who missed its Albuquerque showing, has a profoundly important lesson for us all: heinous crime is not only the province of the Hitler’s, Pinochet’s, and Bashad al-Assad’s of this world. The banality of evil is one of human nature’s least understood components...
Continue reading...Friday Voyage: Two Murals Reach Across Time
12. July 2013
Margaret Randall takes us on a public art appreciation journey that spans millennia.
Continue reading...Friday Journey: Egypt
05. July 2013
Margaret Randall explores this land of contemporary turmoil and ancient glory.
Continue reading...What’s in a picture
02. July 2013
The photo that appears at the beginning of this piece was taken in the rubble left after the April 24th 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza, an eight-story building in Savar, Bangladesh where a number of sweatshops housed clothing workers in abysmally unsafe working conditions. The day before that tragedy, the building had briefly been evacuated when cracks were noticed in its walls. But people were forced back to work; the unceasing fever of profit had to be maintained.
Industrial disasters are all too common in a world greedy for profit...
Continue reading...Friday Voyage: The U.S.-Mexico Border
28. June 2013
The Friday Voyage takes us to Border country, where real people live and die and reality is far more complex than current political tropes.
Continue reading...Friday Voyage - Turkey
21. June 2013
Margaret Randall takes us on a journey through Turkey's haunted past.
Continue reading...Chaco: Seen and Unseen
14. June 2013
Our Friday voyage weaves us through the historical drama of this New Mexico treasure.
Continue reading...Inform yourself
11. June 2013
Inform yourself. The responsibility of every good citizen.
But how?
Way back in a time before the Rabbit Hole opened up and we all passed into that other world where up is down and in is out, it seemed simple. You bought a morning newspaper or listened to the evening news. You thought you were getting the information you needed because you believed your government, church, even the corporations urging you to buy, wanted you to be informed.
It’s been a complex and highly sophisticated road from there to here...
Continue reading...Vietnam: A Country, Not a War
06. June 2013
A journey through trauma, reconciliation and lessons still unlearned.
Continue reading...Kiet Siel: The Hidden Ruin
31. May 2013
A voyage through a lesser known Anasazi ruin frozen in time.
Continue reading...
14. July 2013
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