Author, photographer, translator and award-winning poet Margaret Randall, author, will read from her new collection of poetry, “Vertigo of Risk,” at 6 p.m. Sunday, July 9, at Casa Camino Real Bookstore, 314 S. Tornillo St. in Las Cruces’ Mesquite Historic District.
In addition to this event, Randall will be reading in Silver City on July 8 at noon at the Tranquibuzz Coffee Shop, 300 N. Arizona Street, Silver City. Book sales and signing following reading.
The event is free and open to the public, said Casa Camino Real owner and award-winning author Denise Chávez. A book signing and reception will follow the reading.
“Vertigo of Risk” is Randall’s “aster opus,” Chávez said, a “testimonio to a life lived in the blessed search of truth. The series of poems called “Dearest” which reads as letters to friends and inspirations, leads into a sharpened assembly of pieces that both celebrate and champion life and art, all with Randall’s rich candor and ear for language throughout, Chávez said.
Randall lived in Latin America (México, Cuba and Nicaragua) for 23 years. 1962-69, she and Mexican poet Sergio Mondragón co-edited “El Corno Emplumado” (“The Plumed Horn”), a bilingual literary quarterly “that published some of the best new work of the 1960s,” Chávez said.
When Randall returned to the United States in 1984, “the government ordered her deported because it found some of her writing to be ‘against the good order and happiness of the United States,’” Chavez said. With the support of many writers and others, her citizenship was restored in 1989.
Along with “Vertigo at Risk,” Randall’s recent poetry titles include “Against Atrocity,” “Out of Violence into Poetry,” “Stormclouds Like Unkept Promises,” “Thinking About Thinking,” “Artists in My Life,” “Your Answer is Your Map,” “Luck,” “Home,” “I Never Left Home: Poet, Feminist, Revolutionary” and “Che on My Mind,” a feminist poet’s reminiscence of Argentine revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara.
Two of Randall’s photographs are in the Capitol Art Collection in Santa Fe, Chávez said.
In 2019, Randall received an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of New Mexico. In 2022 she received the City of Albuquerque’s Creative Bravo Award.
Randall lives in Albuquerque with her partner, the painter Barbara Byers, and travels extensively to read, lecture and teach, Chávez said.
Many of Randall’s books will be on sale during the July 9 reading, Chávez said.
For more information, contact Chávez at 575-649-9173 and comezon09@comcast.net.
Visit www.margaretrandall.org.
