Search results for ""author margaret randall""

Margaret Randall's most recent collection of poems, Out of Violence Into Poetry, was written over these past few years when language itself was violated by a president who lied until each lie, repeated often enough, resembled a terrible truth in the public discourse. Reality, sanity, beauty: all bend and run the risk of breaking when distorted beyond recognition. These poems consciously restore language to its natural habitat. They deal with history, memory, loss, life, death and promise. They address love and aging. They become a welcome refuge at a time of uncertainty and take us on disparate journeys that often have surprising twists. There is humor as well as rage. We cannot leave it to the politicians alone to give words their meaning back. That is the job of poets, and this book does that job well. Randall is the author of nearly 200 books, spanning more than six decades. Out of Violence into Poetry may well be her finest collection of poetry to date.

Read more less

A poetry collection about connectivity, this book suggests that humankind is linked by its concerns for global human rights and a sustainable global climate. Named for a root system that connects seemingly separate plants, like a stand of aspen trees, this compilation seeks to celebrate common human roots.

Read more less

Featuring the work of more than fifty poets writing across the last eight decades, Only the Road / Solo el Camino is the most complete bilingual anthology of Cuban poetry available to an English readership. It is distinguished by its stylistic breadth and the diversity of its contributors, who come from throughout Cuba and its diaspora and include luminaries, lesser-known voices, and several Afro-Cuban and LGBTQ poets. Nearly half of the poets in the collection are women. Only the Road paints a full and dynamic picture of modern Cuban life and poetry, highlighting their unique features and idiosyncrasies, the changes across generations, and the ebbs and flows between repression and freedom following the Revolution. Poet Margaret Randall, who translated each poem, contributes extensive biographical notes for each poet and a historical introduction to twentieth-century Cuban poetry.

Read more less

Traces the remarkable life of a feminist poet through the items and images that have have defined her experiences My Life in 100 Objects is a personal reflection on the events and moments that shaped the life and work of one extraordinary woman. With a masterful, poetic voice, Margaret Randall uses talismanic objects and photographs as launching points for her nonlinear narrative. Through each “object,” Randall uncovers another part of herself, starting in a museum in Amman, Jordan, and ending in the Latin American Studies Association in Boston. Interwoven throughout are her most precious relationships, her growth as an artist, and her brave, revolutionary spirit. As Randall’s adventures often coincide with important moments in history, many of her objects provide a transcontinental glimpse into social upheavals and transitions. She shares memories from her years in Cuba (1969 to 1980) and Nicaragua (1980 to 1984), as well as briefer periods in North Vietnam (immediately preceding the end of the war in 1975), and Peru (during the government of Velasco Alvarado). In her introduction, Randall states, “objects and places have always been alive to me.” Her history too is alive, as much of a means to consider our own present as it is to glimpse her vibrant past.

Read more less

Traces the remarkable life of a feminist poet through the items and images that have have defined her experiences My Life in 100 Objects is a personal reflection on the events and moments that shaped the life and work of one extraordinary woman. With a masterful, poetic voice, Margaret Randall uses talismanic objects and photographs as launching points for her nonlinear narrative. Through each “object,” Randall uncovers another part of herself, starting in a museum in Amman, Jordan, and ending in the Latin American Studies Association in Boston. Interwoven throughout are her most precious relationships, her growth as an artist, and her brave, revolutionary spirit. As Randall’s adventures often coincide with important moments in history, many of her objects provide a transcontinental glimpse into social upheavals and transitions. She shares memories from her years in Cuba (1969 to 1980) and Nicaragua (1980 to 1984), as well as briefer periods in North Vietnam (immediately preceding the end of the war in 1975), and Peru (during the government of Velasco Alvarado). In her introduction, Randall states, “objects and places have always been alive to me.” Her history too is alive, as much of a means to consider our own present as it is to glimpse her vibrant past.

Read more less

In her new book, Exporting Revolution, Margaret Randall explores the Cuban Revolution's impact on the outside world, tracing Cuba's international outreach in health care, disaster relief, education, literature, art, liberation struggles, and sports. Randall combines personal observations and interviews with literary analysis and examinations of political trends in order to understand what compels a small, poor, and underdeveloped country to offer its resources and expertise. Why has the Cuban health care system trained thousands of foreign doctors, offered free services, and responded to health crises around the globe? What drives Cuba's international adult literacy programs? Why has Cuban poetry had an outsized influence in the Spanish-speaking world? This multifaceted internationalism, Randall finds, is not only one of the Revolution's most central features; it helped define Cuban society long before the Revolution.

Read more less

Taking part in the Cuban Revolution's first armed action in 1953, enduring the torture and killings of her brother and fiancé, assuming a leadership role in the underground movement, and smuggling weapons into Cuba, Haydée Santamaría was the only woman to participate in every phase of the Revolution. Virtually unknown outside of Cuba, Santamaría was a trusted member of Fidel Castro's inner circle and friend of Che Guevara. Following the Revolution's victory Santamaría founded and ran the cultural and arts institution Casa de las Americas, which attracted cutting-edge artists, exposed Cubans to some of the world's greatest creative minds, and protected queer, black, and feminist artists from state repression. Santamaría's suicide in 1980 caused confusion and discomfort throughout Cuba; despite her commitment to the Revolution, communist orthodoxy's disapproval of suicide prevented the Cuban leadership from mourning and celebrating her in the Plaza of the Revolution. In this impressionistic portrait of her friend Haydée Santamaría, Margaret Randall shows how one woman can help change the course of history.

Read more less

Che on My Mind is an impressionistic look at the life, death, and legacy of Che Guevara by the renowned feminist poet and activist Margaret Randall. Recalling an era and this figure, she writes, "I am old enough to remember the world in which [Che] lived. I was part of that world, and it remains a part of me." Randall participated in the Mexican student movement of 1968 and eventually was forced to leave the country. She arrived in Cuba in 1969, less than two years after Che's death, and lived there until 1980. She became friends with several of Che's family members, friends, and compatriots. In Che on My Mind she reflects on his relationships with his family and fellow insurgents, including Fidel Castro. She is deeply admiring of Che's integrity and charisma and frank about what she sees as his strategic errors. Randall concludes by reflecting on the inspiration and lessons that Che's struggles might offer early twenty-first-century social justice activists and freedom fighters.

Read more less

Che on My Mind is an impressionistic look at the life, death, and legacy of Che Guevara by the renowned feminist poet and activist Margaret Randall. Recalling an era and this figure, she writes, "I am old enough to remember the world in which [Che] lived. I was part of that world, and it remains a part of me." Randall participated in the Mexican student movement of 1968 and eventually was forced to leave the country. She arrived in Cuba in 1969, less than two years after Che's death, and lived there until 1980. She became friends with several of Che's family members, friends, and compatriots. In Che on My Mind she reflects on his relationships with his family and fellow insurgents, including Fidel Castro. She is deeply admiring of Che's integrity and charisma and frank about what she sees as his strategic errors. Randall concludes by reflecting on the inspiration and lessons that Che's struggles might offer early twenty-first-century social justice activists and freedom fighters.

Read more less

Concerns about power, its use and abuse, have been at the center of Margaret Randall’s work for more than fifty years. And over time Randall has acquired a power all her own, as her unique ability to observe, consider, and distill experience has drawn readers into new experiences and insights. Tempered by time and reflecting a life fully lived and richly examined, her thoughts on race, gender, poetry, landscape, cellular memory, and personal loss speak with eloquence and urgency. First Laugh invites readers to ponder the role of race and racism in the 2008 presidential election; the nature of repressed memory in understanding oneself; the place of poetry in social change; the efforts of Pueblo Indians to earn historical recompense for Spanish colonialist atrocity and subsequent abuse; and the bonds of intimacy and shared political conviction that sustain family and friendship. Over the course of her life, Margaret Randall has found herself with the abstract expressionists of the 1950s, the activists of the 1968 Mexican student movement, the Cuban revolutionaries of the 1970s, the North Vietnamese during the last years of the U.S. war, and the Sandinistas. It is our privilege to have her among us now, documenting moments at once personal and universal and showing us new ways to see.

Read more less

First revised edition of interviews with 14 prominent activists whose writings influenced the 1979 Nicaraguan revolution and help us understand present-day Nicaragua Margaret Randall presents a dynamic collection of personal interviews with Nicaragua's most important writer-revolutionaries who played major roles in the 1979 revolution and the subsequent reconstruction. This revised first edition includes a new preface and additional notes that frame the narrative in high relevance to the present day. The featured writer-activists speak of their work and practical tasks in constructing a new society. Among the writers included are Gioconda Belli, Tomás Borge, Omar Cabezas, Ernesto Cardenal, Vidaluz Menéses, Julio Valle-Castillo, and Daisy Zamora. The work also features 50 evocative photographs from the era by Margaret Randall.

Read more less

First revised edition of interviews with 14 prominent activists whose writings influenced the 1979 Nicaraguan revolution and help us understand present-day Nicaragua Margaret Randall presents a dynamic collection of personal interviews with Nicaragua's most important writer-revolutionaries who played major roles in the 1979 revolution and the subsequent reconstruction. This revised first edition includes a new preface and additional notes that frame the narrative in high relevance to the present day. The featured writer-activists speak of their work and practical tasks in constructing a new society. Among the writers included are Gioconda Belli, Tomás Borge, Omar Cabezas, Ernesto Cardenal, Vidaluz Menéses, Julio Valle-Castillo, and Daisy Zamora. The work also features 50 evocative photographs from the era by Margaret Randall.

Read more less

In 1969, poet and revolutionary Margaret Randall was forced underground when the Mexican government cracked down on all those who took part in the 1968 student movement. Needing to leave the country, she sent her four young children alone to Cuba while she scrambled to find safe passage out of Mexico. In I Never Left Home, Randall recounts her harrowing escape and the other extraordinary stories from her life and career. From living among New York's abstract expressionists in the mid-1950s as a young woman to working in the Nicaraguan Ministry of Culture to instill revolutionary values in the media during the Sandinista movement, the story of Randall's life reads like a Hollywood production. Along the way, she edited a bilingual literary journal in Mexico City, befriended Cuban revolutionaries, raised a family, came out as a lesbian, taught college, and wrote over 150 books. Throughout it all, Randall never wavered from her devotion to social justice. When she returned to the United States in 1984 after living in Latin America for twenty-three years, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service ordered her to be deported for her “subversive writing.” Over the next five years, and with the support of writers, entertainers, and ordinary people across the country, Randall fought to regain her citizenship, which she won in court in 1989. As much as I Never Left Home is Randall's story, it is also the story of the communities of artists, writers, and radicals she belonged to. Randall brings to life scores of creative and courageous people on the front lines of creating a more just world. She also weaves political and social analyses and poetry into the narrative of her life. Moving, captivating, and astonishing, I Never Left Home is a remarkable story of a remarkable woman.

Read more less

Taking part in the Cuban Revolution's first armed action in 1953, enduring the torture and killings of her brother and fiancé, assuming a leadership role in the underground movement, and smuggling weapons into Cuba, Haydée Santamaría was the only woman to participate in every phase of the Revolution. Virtually unknown outside of Cuba, Santamaría was a trusted member of Fidel Castro's inner circle and friend of Che Guevara. Following the Revolution's victory Santamaría founded and ran the cultural and arts institution Casa de las Americas, which attracted cutting-edge artists, exposed Cubans to some of the world's greatest creative minds, and protected queer, black, and feminist artists from state repression. Santamaría's suicide in 1980 caused confusion and discomfort throughout Cuba; despite her commitment to the Revolution, communist orthodoxy's disapproval of suicide prevented the Cuban leadership from mourning and celebrating her in the Plaza of the Revolution. In this impressionistic portrait of her friend Haydée Santamaría, Margaret Randall shows how one woman can help change the course of history.

Read more less

In the early 1980s, in the midst of Central America’s decades of dirty wars, Nora Miselem of Honduras and Maria Suárez Toro of Costa Rica were kidnapped and subjected to rape and other tortures. Of the nearly two hundred disappeared persons in Honduras in those years, they are, remarkably, two of only five survivors. Fourteen years after their ordeal, Suárez and Miselem’s chance meeting at a conference on human rights was witnessed by and is now retold in Margaret Randall’s When I Look into the Mirror andSee You.Through direct testimony, vivid prose, and evocative photographs, Randall recounts the terror, resistance, and survival of Suárez and Miselem. The book details the abuses suffered by them, the ruses they used to foil their captors, the support that they gave each other while imprisoned, the means they used to escape, and their attempts to reconstruct their lives. For the first time, Suárez and Miselem explore the pain and trauma of their past and Randall has done the service of adding these remarkable voices to the global campaign to bring the world’s attention to women’s human rights.

Read more less

About Little Charlie Lindbergh, like earlier Margaret Randall poetry collections, presents a unique poetic voice by a revered elder in the genre. These poems are all about making connections, many of them unexpected. Randall links national events with intimate family moments, ancient ruins with present-day communities, and prehistory with history (making a convincing argument for the former as a part of the latter). Everyday speech and expressions that have become social cliches or advertising banter find their way into these poems and acquire the precision of literary elegance. Straightforward speech becomes passionate lyricism. This book gives lie to the notion that so-called political poetry must by nature come off as propagandistic; complexity and grace are always present. The poems collected here pay attention to birth, love, loss, Jewish identity, domestic and international violence, the environment, language, art, class, race, gender, and sexual identity. All these seemingly disparate subjects are linked by an empowering way of seeing and saying. This is social justice poetry that packs a wallop and moves the reader deeply.

Read more less

Detailing the natural and human history of Rapa Nui - more commonly known as Easter Island - this extraordinary collection of poems and photographs links together the ancient inhabitants of the most isolated, inhabited spot on earth with common concerns and hopes of the present. Illustrating the unique culture and ongoing struggle to survive against dramatic odds, this volume dramatically depicts the basic desires, misgivings, and challenges that human beings have long faced, regardless of time and place.

Read more less

In her new book, Exporting Revolution, Margaret Randall explores the Cuban Revolution's impact on the outside world, tracing Cuba's international outreach in health care, disaster relief, education, literature, art, liberation struggles, and sports. Randall combines personal observations and interviews with literary analysis and examinations of political trends in order to understand what compels a small, poor, and underdeveloped country to offer its resources and expertise. Why has the Cuban health care system trained thousands of foreign doctors, offered free services, and responded to health crises around the globe? What drives Cuba's international adult literacy programs? Why has Cuban poetry had an outsized influence in the Spanish-speaking world? This multifaceted internationalism, Randall finds, is not only one of the Revolution's most central features; it helped define Cuban society long before the Revolution.

Read more less

In Voices from the Center of the World, Randall has gathered 25 poets born in Ecuador between 1926 and 1993. These include some cultural heroes of the 20th century, and many of the voices that define Peruvian political dissent. It also focuses on a new generations of poets, especially women and indigenous poets born after 1950. Especially exciting are poets writing in the Kichwa language, Ariruma Kowii (1961) and Lucila Lema (1974) who serve as custodians of indigenous knowledge and imaginations, at once political, historical, and ancestral. Margaret Randall's selection and translations are alert to the edges and cadences of an individual idiom, to the plural alignments with the long view of history, and to consciousness of the country's literary dynamism. Often overshadowed by the literatures of Colombia, Argentina and Chile, Voices from the Center of the World brings the literature of Peru -- fully engaged in contemporary issues like human rights and climate change, yet infused with a wisdom drawn from its ancient mountain cultures.

Read more less

The Morning After is Margaret Randall's 30th poetry collection and eleventh with Wings Press. The title poem was written, as so many in this country were, the morning after the November 8, 2016 presidential election: "I wish there was a pill for that," is one of its lines. But Randall doesn't stay with anger, irony, or a pamphleteering voice. Her work goes much deeper, grappling with ageless concerns and unexpected details. Throughout this volume there is a concern with time, place, and memory; intimate landscape; mature love; the current threat to the richness of language; global consciousness; a mapping of human questioning and exploration of identity. In these pages the reader will find George Zimmerman's gun, a herd of buffalo at Standing Rock, rebar, the Super Moon, ""reptile dysfunction,"" and multiple choice vs. Socratic wisdom. Reflecting Randall's recent work with translation, several poems take on that practice in its broadest sense. Stylistically, for the first time in half a century she has gone back to her modus of the 1960s and mixed story and prosody with poetry; only now the result is more sophisticated and much harder hitting. The title poem of The Morning After first appeared in two anthologies of poetry responding to the January 2017 presidential inauguration: Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance and Truth to Power; and in Spanish translation in Revista Casa de las Américas, Havana, Cuba. The Morning After contains powerful poems of witness as well as personal poems, both of which soar through "limitless rooms, unfenced spaces / where our thoughts may procreate / before they change direction," as well as autobiographical prose pieces (that read like prose poems), recounting a life of resistance, the life of a life-long literary and political revolutionary. If ever there were a time for the words of Margaret Randall, it is now. Read this book. Howl this book!

Read more less

Featuring the work of more than fifty poets writing across the last eight decades, Only the Road / Solo el Camino is the most complete bilingual anthology of Cuban poetry available to an English readership. It is distinguished by its stylistic breadth and the diversity of its contributors, who come from throughout Cuba and its diaspora and include luminaries, lesser-known voices, and several Afro-Cuban and LGBTQ poets. Nearly half of the poets in the collection are women. Only the Road paints a full and dynamic picture of modern Cuban life and poetry, highlighting their unique features and idiosyncrasies, the changes across generations, and the ebbs and flows between repression and freedom following the Revolution. Poet Margaret Randall, who translated each poem, contributes extensive biographical notes for each poet and a historical introduction to twentieth-century Cuban poetry.

Read more less

"A collection of varied and amazing lives, all bent on shaping history. Together, these experienced, undeterred Nicaraguan women offer powerful clues about a truly revolutionary and democratizing feminism."––Adrienne Rich"If it were not for writers like Margaret, how would women around the world find each other when there is such an institutional effort to keep us apart and silent? Here Margaret brings us the voice of Sandino's daughters, honoring his hat and wearing their own, wiser now, having been part of political and personal revolution."––Holly Near"Powerful, moving, and challenging. Everyone interested in decency and justice will want to read Sandino's Daughters Revisited."––Blanche Wiesen CookSandino's Daughters, Margaret Randall's conversations with Nicaraguan women in their struggle against the dictator Somoza in 1979, brought the lives of a group of extraordinary female revolutionaries to the American and world public. The book remains a landmark. Now, a decade later, Randall returns to interview many of the same women and others. In Sandino's Daughters Revisited, they speak of their lives during and since the Sandinista administration, the ways in which the revolution made them strong––and also held them back. Ironically, the 1990 defeat of the Sandinistas at the ballot box has given Sandinista women greater freedom to express their feelings and ideas. Randall interviewed these outspoken women from all walks of life: working-class Diana Espinoza, head bookkeeper of a employee-owned factory; Daisy Zamora, a vice minister of culture under the Sandinistas; and Vidaluz Meneses, daughter of a Somozan official, who ties her revolutionary ideals to her Catholicism. The voices of these women, along with nine others, lead us to recognize both the failed promises and continuing attraction of the Sandinista movement for women. This is a moving account of the relationship between feminism and revolution as it is expressed in the daily lives of Nicaraguan women.

Read more less

Incorporating short prose, photography, and poetry, this memoir celebrates Albuquerque, New Mexico, and recollects how the author's life and the city itself were impacted by Cold War politics, the atomic bomb, McCarthyism, racism, and misogyny. Covering topics such as familial relationships, troubled marriage, lesbianism, and human rights activism, this collection also provides a poetic understanding of the region's history and culture over the past half century. Politically charged, this account highlights inhumane government policies while recounting the history of this Southwestern town.

Read more less

In 1937 tens of thousands of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic were slaughtered by Dominican troops wielding machetes and knives. Dominican writer and lawyer Freddy Prestol Castillo worked on the Haiti-Dominican Republic border during the massacre, known as “The Cutting,” and documented the atrocities in real time in You Can Cross the Massacre on Foot. Written in 1937, published in Spanish in 1973, and appearing here in English for the first time, Prestol Castillo's novel is one of the few works that details the massacre's scale and scope. Conveying the horror of witnessing such inhumane violence firsthand, it is both an attempt to come to terms with personal and collective guilt and a search to understand how people can be driven to indiscriminately kill their neighbors.

Read more less

Fearless personal essays from a treasured feminist poet and activist Luck is a collection of essays covering such topics as memory, language, landscape, poetry, anger, sex, food, pandemics, war, violence, feminism, lies, imagination, death, power, identity, and of course luck. Some are full-blown explorations, others brief riffs. Some are prose poetry, others straightforward prose. The author combines scholarly research with personal experience, producing texts both intimate and illuminating. Always attentive to the world around her and the one within, Randall has brought us her most relevant and powerful essays to date.

Read more less

Fearless personal essays from a treasured feminist poet and activist Luck is a collection of essays covering such topics as memory, language, landscape, poetry, anger, sex, food, pandemics, war, violence, feminism, lies, imagination, death, power, identity, and of course luck. Some are full-blown explorations, others brief riffs. Some are prose poetry, others straightforward prose. The author combines scholarly research with personal experience, producing texts both intimate and illuminating. Always attentive to the world around her and the one within, Randall has brought us her most relevant and powerful essays to date.

Read more less

In 1937 tens of thousands of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic were slaughtered by Dominican troops wielding machetes and knives. Dominican writer and lawyer Freddy Prestol Castillo worked on the Haiti-Dominican Republic border during the massacre, known as “The Cutting,” and documented the atrocities in real time in You Can Cross the Massacre on Foot. Written in 1937, published in Spanish in 1973, and appearing here in English for the first time, Prestol Castillo's novel is one of the few works that details the massacre's scale and scope. Conveying the horror of witnessing such inhumane violence firsthand, it is both an attempt to come to terms with personal and collective guilt and a search to understand how people can be driven to indiscriminately kill their neighbors.

Read more less

When Rains Became Floods is the gripping autobiography of Lurgio Gavilán Sánchez, who as a child soldier fought for both the Peruvian guerrilla insurgency Shining Path and the Peruvian military. After escaping the conflict, he became a Franciscan priest and is now an anthropologist. Gavilán Sánchez's words mark otherwise forgotten acts of brutality and kindness, moments of misery and despair as well as solidarity and love.

Read more less

For nearly three centuries, Cuba's economy was based on a single crop - sugar cane. After Fidel Castro's Revolution of 1959, despite serious attempts at diversification, the country continued to depend on the monocrop. Men and women cut cane by hand. City people who had never swung a machete spent long volunteer hours aiding the national effort. But the US embargo and diminishing international markets destroyed Cuba's economy. Gaudencio Rodríguez Santana's The National Economy explores that collapse and its physical, emotional and psychic consequences. It is a powerful, insightful collection of eye-witness poems by one of Cuba's most celebrated contemporary poets.

Read more less

When Rains Became Floods is the gripping autobiography of Lurgio Gavilán Sánchez, who as a child soldier fought for both the Peruvian guerrilla insurgency Shining Path and the Peruvian military. After escaping the conflict, he became a Franciscan priest and is now an anthropologist. Gavilán Sánchez's words mark otherwise forgotten acts of brutality and kindness, moments of misery and despair as well as solidarity and love.

Read more less

Lavinia is accomplished, independent, and fiercely modern. She is also sheltered and self-involved, until the spirit of an Indian woman warrior enters her being. Then she dares to join a revolutionary movement against a violent dictator and finds the courage to act.

Read more less

Margaret Randall reveals personal stories and profound insights about the artists who most influenced her life. Artists in My Life is a collection of intimate and conversational accounts of the visual artists that have impacted the renowned poet activist Margaret Randall on her own journey as an artist. Randall writes of each relationship through multiple lenses: as makers of art, social commentators, women in a world dominated by male values, and in solitude or collaboration with communities and the larger artistic arena. Each story offers insight into the artist’s life and work, and analyses the impact it had on Randall’s own work and its impact on the larger art community. The work strives to answer bigger questions about visual art as a whole and its lasting political influence on the world stage. Randalls describes her motivations: ”I go beneath the surface, asking questions and telling stories. I have wanted to answer questions such as: Why is it that visual art—drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, architecture—grabs me and, in particular instances, feels as if it changes me at the molecular level? How do art and memory interact? How do reason and intuition come together in art? Do women and men make art differently? Does great art change the viewer? Does it change the artist? How does art travel through time?”

Read more less

A candid and generous color-illustrated account of women artists creating politically and personally effective art works, exhibitions, and actions over two tumultuous decades This abundantly illustrated personal narrative takes readers through twenty-two years of activism in the women's art movements in New York City during a period of great cultural change. Author Sabra Moore vividly recounts life in this era of social upheaval in which women artists responded to war, racial tension and reconciliation, cultural and aesthetic inequality, and struggles for reproductive freedom. We learn intimately how she and fellow women artists found ways to create politically and personally effective art works, exhibitions, actions, and institutions. The book features Moore's involvement in pivotal art organizations of this time and her own development as an artist, counterbalanced with her connections to family in rural East Texas and friends in New Mexico. Moore was a member of the Heresies Collective, an influential feminist activist group, became editor of their art and politics journal Heresies, and was president of the NYC/Women's Caucus for Art. She helped coordinate and curate many of the earliest large-scale exhibitions of women artists in NYC, including Views by Women Artists (1982), and the collaborative shows Reconstruction Project and Connections Project/Conexus. Moore was a principle organizer of the 1984 demonstration against MoMA over their lack of inclusion of women artists and was a member of various groundbreaking collaborative arts groups in the 1970s, including Atlantic Gallery and WAR (Women Artists in Revolution). While Openings is an historical narrative of women artists' actions, organizations, and ideas, it also candidly describes their periods of challenge, including the death of sculptor Ana Mendieta and the indictment of her husband and the author's own attempted murder by her former art teacher. The book is illustrated throughout by a treasure of 950 color and black & white images of the art from this momentous period: a valuable collection that is concurrently being archived by Barnard College along with papers, letters, show cards, posters, original artworks, and other documents. This eye-opening book includes forewords by renowned art critic Lucy Lippard and poet/activist Margaret Randall.

Read more less

Time's Language contains powerful poems of witness as well as personal poems, and autobiographical prose pieces (that read like prose poems), recounting a life of resistance, the life of a life-long literary and political revolutionary. As US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera writes, "Here are Margaret Randall’s decades of love, ink, tears, contestation and light—let us bow in gratitude for this truth-telling, daring, border-breaking, pioneering long-time volume of soul fire.

Read more less