Voices from the Center of the World: Contemporary Poets of Ecuador

by Margaret Randall (editor)

In VOICES FROM THE CENTER OF THE WORLD, Randall has gathered 25 poets born in Ecuador between 1926 and 1993. These include some cultural heroes of the 20th century, and many of the voices that define Peruvian political dissent. It also focuses on a new generations of poets, especially women and indigenous poets born after 1950. Especially exciting are poets writing in the Kichwa language, Ariruma Kowii (1961) and Lucila Lema (1974) who serve as custodians of indigenous knowledge and imaginations, at once political, historical, and ancestral. Margaret Randall's selection and translations are alert to the edges and cadences of an individual idiom, to the plural alignments with the long view of history, and to consciousness of the country's literary dynamism. Often overshadowed by the literatures of Colombia, Argentina and Chile, VOICES FROM THE CENTER OF THE WORLD brings the literature of Peru -- fully engaged in contemporary issues like human rights and climate change, yet infused with a wisdom drawn from its ancient mountain cultures.

178 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 17, 2020

About the author

Margaret Randall is a feminist poet, writer, photographer and social activist. She has lived for extended periods in Albuquerque, New York, Seville, Mexico City, Havana, and Managua. Shorter stays in Peru and North Vietnam were also formative. In the turbulent 1960s she co-founded and co-edited EL CORNO EMPLUMADO / THE PLUMED HORN, a bilingual literary journal which for eight years published some of the most dynamic and meaningful writing of an era. From 1984 through 1994 she taught at a number of U.S. universities.

Margaret was privileged to live among New York’s abstract expressionists in the 1950s and early ’60s, participate in the Mexican student movement of 1968, share important years of the Cuban revolution (1969-1980), the first four years of Nicaragua’s Sandinista project (1980-1984), and visit North Vietnam during the heroic last months of the U.S. American war in that country (1974). Her four children—Gregory, Sarah, Ximena and Ana—have given her ten grandchildren: Lia, Martin, Daniel, Richi, Sebastian, Juan, Luis Rodrigo, Mariana, Eli, and Tolo. She has lived with her life companion, the painter and teacher Barbara Byers, for almost a quarter century.