Robin Morgan - Adult Career

Adult Career

As she entered adulthood, Morgan continued her education as a nonmatriculating student at Columbia University. She began working as a secretary at Curtis Brown Literary Agency. Famed poet W. H. Auden was among the writers she met there in the early 1960s, and around that time she also began publishing her own poetry (later collected in her 1972 first book of poems Monster). Throughout the next decades, along with political activism and lecturing at colleges and universities on feminism, she continued to write and publish prose and poetry.

In 1962 she married the poet Kenneth Pitchford. Her son, Blake Morgan, was born in 1969. She worked as an editor at Grove Press and was involved in the attempt to unionize the publishing industry; Grove summarily fired her and other union sympathizers. She led a seizure and occupation of Grove Press offices in the spring of 1970, protesting the union-busting as well as dishonest accounting of royalties to Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X's widow. She and eight other women were arrested.

In the mid 1970s, she became a Contributing Editor to Ms. Magazine, to continue there as a part- or fulltime editor for the next decades, and becoming editor-in-chief from 1989 to 1994. During her time as editor-in-chief, she turned the magazine into an ad-free, bimonthly, international publication.