A Conversation with Margaret Randall

NEWS | TUESDAY, APRIL 7 | BY FUSION STAFF WRITER, RUDOLFO CARRILLO

In this world, as well as in the world of literature and letters, Margaret Randall is a luminary; her light shines brightly for just about anyone willing to open one of her books, read her poems and essays, or listen to her read. In New Mexico, and in Albuquerque, Randall is a legend; her work with the community as a voice of contemplation, resistance, and action has influenced and emboldened generations of writers and activists.

Randall, now nearing ninety years of age, continues to work diligently and precisely from her home in Northern New Mexico. Her latest book of poems, The Calendar’s Whim, was published by Casa Urraca Press in March of this year, 2026.

Along with fellow Casa Urraca Press notable Dodici Azpadu and UNM Creative Writing alum Tani Arness, Randall will be reading from her voluminous work at FUSION on Friday, April 10, from 6–7:30 PM, in an event entitled Poetry in Three Voices.

I wasn’t familiar with Randall’s work only because of my recent association with UNM’s English Department; in fact, I grew up reading her writing as an undergraduate art student at that same school. Living in the “student ghetto” adjacent to campus, I spent an inordinate amount of time at her brother’s now-mythical bookstore, Salt of the Earth Books. John Randall let me read and browse for hours and also told me about two nearby bookstores I might fancy: Full Circle Books, a feminist bookstore near Silver and Yale, and The Living Batch, on Cornell, behind the Frontier Restaurant. Those places had heaps of Margaret Randall’s books, and in some cases, folks were lining up to buy one of those tomes for themselves. Later on, I got to work with Randall through her association with local poetry wrangler Jon Knudsen at the long-gone Duke City Fix.

Needless to say, it was an honor to chat with Randall about her upcoming appearance at FUSION. Here’s a glimpse into that bright, only sorta star-struck conversation.

Rudolfo Carrillo: I want to talk to you about your new book, The Calendar’s Whim, and Casa Urraca Press, where one of your co-readers, Dodici Azpadu, is also publishing. So maybe, can we start there and kind of work our way back, if that’s okay with you?

Margaret Randall: Well, first of all, Casa Urraca Press is a great press. It’s in northern New Mexico. It’s a small independent press and it’s had, nevertheless, a very large following for about six years now. They’ve got a great list of over fifty titles published in that time. Most books are by New Mexico authors or authors in the southwest, in this area, although a few have been by people from further afield. Now, Zach Hively, who is the editor there, and the person who runs the press, has been publishing me for a number of years, maybe four or five years. I have [published] seven or eight books with the press. Most are poetry, a couple, a few are essays. And I actually have a very different kind of book coming up next year with Casa Urraca, which will be a kind of poet’s travelogue of New Mexico.

The publication of your new volume of poems coincides with the reading that you are sharing with two other literary notables at FUSION on April 12. I know that Dodici Azpadu’s novel Living Room was named one of the best LGBT books of 2011 by feminist publisher Carol Seajay, and that Arness comes from UNM’s much lauded Creative Writing Program… Could you tell our readers a bit about that combination of creatives?

Dodici is an accomplished writer who has published many other books, including novels. Cloak is Dodici’s first book with Casa Urraca. So I’m thrilled to be reading with them. I’m also thrilled to be reading with Tani Arness, who is a marvelous poet as well. Her recent work appears in a collection called Tzimtzum: 5 Contemporary Poets Lend Us Their Hearts, and she will be reading poems from Who Will Speak to Snakes, which is forthcoming [from 3: A Taos Press]. So I think the three of us are going to have a good time. And I think the audience will have a good time because our voices are very different from one another.

The Calendar’s Whim is available now; how does that feel?

It's a beautiful book. It came out in March. And it’s a collection of poems. It actually begins with a kind of interesting item, which is myself interviewing myself. So it starts with that self-interview, and then it goes on to just be a book of poems.

What interested you, what influenced you as a poet, in this volume of work?

You know, Rudy, I think I’ve always been interested in more or less the same themes. Memory is a big theme in my work, in my poetry, as well as my other work. So memory, landscape—the New Mexico landscape—is important to me. Justice is important. I get very angry about what’s going on in the world today, especially in this country. And so that comes into my poems. I’m a lesbian, I’m a mother, I’m a grandmother, I’m a great-grandmother. So those relationships come into my work as well. My work is varied but I think that there’s a sort of a core interest in memory and memory erasure in history, both collective and personal, [a history] that the people who control us these days, or would like to think they control us, are working so hard to erase. As a poet, one of my jobs or one of my goals is to reclaim and reinsert that memory.

Where do you find joy while on such a fierce endeavor? What is joyful now in the life of the poet Margaret Randall? What are your sources of joy and inspiration?

Oh, I have a lot of sources of joy. Those are great questions, Rudy! I get joy from my relationship with my wife. We’ve been together for forty years now. She’s an artist, and so our home is very much the home of two artists. We support one another in different mediums. We critique one another. We love one another’s work, so that gives me joy. I love to cook, so food gives me joy, and feeding people. I think that’s a kind of Jewish or Latin American attribute.

I love the landscape that we live in, here in northern New Mexico. At almost ninety years of age, I can’t hike anymore or bike anymore like I used to, but I love taking road trips and seeing those places that I’ve loved, that I continue to love. I get a tremendous amount of joy from good poets, reading good poetry, listening to good poets, which is one reason why I’m so thrilled to be reading with Dodici and Tani. There’re many, many things that give me joy, and that’s actually one of the reasons why what’s going on now [the war] is so horrifying to me, because humanity has created this marvelous poetry, and art and music and writing and architecture, sculpture; I mean, so much beauty. It’s criminal that this could be destroyed so easily by a small group of people who are greedy and narcissistic and don’t think of anyone but themselves.

POETRY IN THREE VOICES
Friday, April 10, 2026
6:00 PM  7:30 PM
FUSION | The Cell
700 1st Street Northwest Albuquerque, NM, 87102

Free RSVP Here.