As a teenager in Texas, Marilyn Buck joined movements to end the war in Vietnam and fight the oppression of Black people in the U.S. Later, she actively supported anti-imperialist struggles and the Black Liberation Movement; in 1973 convicted of purchasing handgun ammunition, she was given a ten-year sentence. After four years in a Federal prison in Alderson, West Virginia, she was granted a furlough and went underground. Recaptured eight years later she was convicted of several politically motivated conspiracies and acts—including the freeing of Assata Shakur, now in political exile in Cuba. Marilyn's sentences totalled eighty years. In Dublin-FCI in California, she became deeply involved in many projects, including mV/AIDS education. Buck has won PEN awards for poetry and nonfiction. Among her collections of poetry is Rescue the Word (2002); in 2008, City Lights Books published Buck's translation of Cristina Peri Rossi's State of Exile, which was her Master's thesis. She expects to be released in March 2010.
