Martha King and Margaret Randall are the authors of recently published memoirs tracing artistic community, action, and liberation through the seismic changes of the last half century. With deeply felt documentation, King and Randall articulate closely related stories of will, vision, and friendship that have shaped avant-garde work and life.
Martha King is a poet, fiction writer, memoirist, and editor. Her most recent book Outside Inside follows a life of passionate art-making and friendships from Black Mountain College to San Francisco to New York City in the sixties. Other books include the story collection North & South (Spuyten Duyvil); Imperfect Fit: Selected Poems (Marsh Hawk); and Little Tales of Family and War (Spuyten Duyvil). Her zine, Giants Play Well in the Drizzle, which published from 1983 to 1993, is part of the Rare Books collection at SUNY Buffalo. With Elinor Nauen, she has hosted a monthly reading series, Prose Pros, at Side Walk Cafe. She lives in Brooklyn.
Margaret Randall (New York) is a poet, essayist, oral historian, translator, photographer and social activist. She has published more than 150 books of poetry, essay and oral history. Among her most recent poetry collections are: The Morning After: Poetry and Prose for a Post-Truth World, Against Atrocity and Time's Language: Selected Poems 1959-2018 (all from Wings Press). A forthcoming collection, Out of Violence into Poetry, will be released by Wings in fall 2021. Randall lived in Latin America for 23 years (Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua). In 2019 she was given the "Poet of Two Hemispheres" award by Poesía en Paralelo Cero, Quito, Ecuador. That same year Cuba's Casa de las Américas gave her its prestigious Haydée Santamaría medal. A memoir, I Never Left Home: Poet, Feminist, Revolutionary, was published by Duke University Press in Spring 2020 and My Life in 100 Objects by New Village Press the same year. Wings Press released her Starfish on a Beach: The Pandemic Poems as we continue to be plagued by the coronavirus. In March 2020 AWP named her recipient of the year of its George Garrett Award and in June Chapman University awarded her its Paulo Freire Prize.
We encourage enthusiastic readers and listeners to engage more deeply with Martha King's and Margaret Randall's works by purchasing their books. Martha King's Outside/Inside: Just outside the art world’s inside is available through BlazeVOX books; Margaret Randall's I Never Left Home: Poet, Feminist, Revolutionary is available through Duke University Press.