REPORT FROM SANTA FE

SUNDAY, **June 26** at 8:00 a.m. on Ch. 5.1 & 4:30 p.m. on Ch. 5.4 and Streaming on the PBS Video App.

This Week: MARGARET RANDALL, Author & Activist

Award-Winning Writer of Over 200 Books

Discusses: "I Never Left Home - A Memoir of Time and Place"

June 23, 2022 – This week's guest on REPORT FROM SANTA FE is author and activist Margaret Randall, award winning writer of over 200 books, discussing her new memoir "I Never Left Home - A Memoir of Time and Place."

Randall, who lives in Albuquerque, recently received the Creative Bravo Award from the City of Albuquerque. In 2019, the University of New Mexico awarded her its Doctor Honoris Causa in Letters. Two of Randall’s photographs are in the Capitol Collection at the Round House in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 2017 she was awarded a medal for Literary Achievement by the state of Chihuahua, Mexico, in 2019 Poesía en Paralelo Cero gave her its “Poet of Two Hemispheres Prize”, and Casa de las Américas in Cuba gave her its prestigious Haydée Santamaría medal. In 2020 she won AWP’s George Garrett prize and Chapman University’s Paulo Freire distinction.

She grew up in New Mexico until she was 18, at which point, she went to New York for several years and then to Latin America (Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua) where she lived for almost a quarter of a century. She adds, “But New Mexico is my home, it is my home place, the land especially. The landscape is very central to my work.”

In that quarter century in Latin America, she lived in Cuba for some time. As a feminist author and activist, she wanted to understand what a socialist world and a socialist revolution meant for women’s issues. She discovered that Cuba's socialist revolution affected women in many positive ways, healthcare for all, equal education for women, and more women entering the workforce.

The aging process has been an inspiration for Randall and she writes about how growing old is something that we have learn how to do. And it’s a steep learning curve. Randall comments, “We lose so many abilities, so much agility and so forth. But for me, age, at least to this point, has also been quite marvelous. It has given me the opportunity to sit with myself, to think about my life, and the life of people I love...So I approach aging in a complex way, I try to write about it honestly with its ups and downs, but I also write about it admiringly.”

Among her best-known books are Cuban Women Now, Sandino’s Daughters, Sandino’s Daughters Revisited, and When I Look into the Mirror and see You: Women, Terror and Resistance (all oral history with essay).Recent books include Che On My Mind (essay), The Rhizome as a Field of Broken Bones[11] (poetry), and Haydée Santamaría, Cuban Revolutionary: She Led by Transgression (essays). Very popular recent works include My Life in 100 Objects and Stormclouds Like Unkept Promises.

REPORT FROM SANTA FE airs on all three PBS stations across New Mexico:

· KNME New Mexico PBS - Santa Fe/Albuquerque – Northern & Central New Mexico = Sundays, 8:00 am on Ch.5.1 (excepting Pledge Drives) & 4:30 pm on Ch.5.4 ·

-KENW/Channel 3 – Portales – Eastern New Mexico · Saturday afternoon, 6:00 pm

·-KRWG/Channel 22 - Las Cruces – Southern New Mexico, Sunday mornings, 8:00 am

· Streaming on-demand on the PBS Video App.

· REPORT FROM SANTA FE also airs on the radio at 9:30 a.m. every Monday, on Albuquerque radio station KANW-FM, 89.1.