Margaret Randall & Barbara Byers are featured in person at Jules’ Poetry Playhouse. Margaret Randall reads from her new book, Stormclouds Like Unkept Promises by Casa Urraca Press with photographs and a slide show projection by Barbara Byers.
Doors open at noon. Reading at 1 pm. Book signing follows.
Free. Books for sale. Donations accepted. Proof of COVID vaccination required for entry (we will be checking cards) and masks required indoors. Refreshments served outside. Book signing follows reading. Reading will be recorded and archived on our Youtube channel.
Casa Urraca has a softcover edition and also 100 beautiful numbered and signed hardcover copies with dust jackets. Both editions are expected to be at this special event.
Jules’ Poetry Playhouse is located at 11 Homestead Lane, Placitas, New Mexico. Aprx 10 miles north of Albuquerque and 45 miles south of Santa Fe. Take I-25 and exit at 242 for Placitas. Head east 2.3 miles. You will pass the Homestead shopping center (and the Merc) on your left. The first DIRT ROAD on your left is Homestead Lane. Jules’ Poetry Playhouse is the first house on the left. Drive around to your left to the far west end of the wall and the last door is the entrance to the Poetry Playhouse. Park free anywhere near the circular drive. Watch for the signs. The nearest Railrunner stop is at Bernalillo.
Margaret Randall and Barbara Byers
Margaret Randall (New York, 1936) is a poet, essayist, oral historian, translator, photographer and social activist. She lived in Latin America for 23 years (in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua). From 1962 to 1969 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 sixties. When she came home 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”. With the support of many writers and others, she won her case, and her citizenship was restored in 1989. Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, she taught at several universities, most often Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Randall’s most recent poetry titles include THE MORNING AFTER: POETRY & PROSE IN A POST-TRUTH WORLD, AGAINST ATROCITY, OUT OF VIOLENCE INTO POETRY (all from Wings Press), and STORMCLOUDS LIKE UNKEPT PROMISES (Casa Urraca Press). CHE ON MY MIND (a feminist poet’s reminiscence of Che Guevara, published by Duke University Press), and THINKING ABOUT THINKING (essays, from Casa Urraca) are other recent titles. HAYDEE SANTAMARIA, CUBAN REVOLUTIONARY: SHE LED BY TRANSGRESSION was released by Duke in 2015. EXPORTING REVOLUTION: CUBA’S GLOBAL SOLIDARITY was published by Duke in 2017. And in 2020 Duke published her memoir, I NEVER LEFT HOME: POET, FEMINIST, REVOLUTIONARY. Two of Randall’s photographs are in the Capitol Art Collection in Santa Fe. She has also devoted herself to translation, producing WHEN RAINS BECOME FLOODS by Lurgio Galván Sánchez and ONLY THE ROAD / SOLO EL CAMINO, an anthology of eight decades of Cuban poetry (both also published by Duke), among many other titles. Randall received the 2017 Medalla al Mérito Literario, awarded by Literatura en el Bravo in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. In 2018 she was awarded the “Poet of two Hemispheres” prize by Poesía en Paralelo Cero in Quito, Ecuador. In 2022 she earned the City of Albuquerque’s Creative Bravo Award. Randall lives in Albuquerque with her partner (now wife) of more than 35 years, the painter Barbara Byers, and travels extensively to read, lecture, and teach.
About the Photographer
Barbara Byers was born in Denver, Colorado in the middle of the twentieth century. She has tried to study art in formal ways but is mostly self-taught. She worked in sign shops in Denver and Albuquerque to learn that art form. She has lived in Albuquerque for 45 years, painting signs, teaching kids with special needs and making art. Her heart home is the desert and slick rock country of the Colorado Plateau.
Of her work, she says: “As a child, I was not nurtured but forced. As an adult, I oppose force and try to learn how to nurture myself, as well as all the people around me. Starting in the Spring of 2010, I have had the opportunity and desire to turn all my working energy to art. As a painter and maker of hand-made books, I want to brighten the world around me. I want my art to be used, looked at and enjoyed every day. The process of making this art is life itself for me. I am most whole and alive when I am working. The longer I live, the less clear the distinction between art and not art becomes. I know myself best as an artist who participates on many levels in a very complex world. Kindness is a value that comes to be more and more central to my life.”
The photographs in this book were made as Barbara explored her neighborhood and home, noticing shapes and details. She used the camera in her I-Phone 12 Pro.