Belle Randall
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Poet, Writer & Critic
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BELLE RANDALL grew up in the Bay Area and attended Berkeley High School. Stage struck as a teenager, she won an acting scholarship to the Ensemble Theater in San Francisco, where, at age 18, she won a city-wide audition to play the part of Saint Joan in Jean Anuih's "The Lark" (University of San Francisco). The following year, she entered U.C. Berkeley, where her Freshman English teacher was Thom Gunn, who became a lifelong friend until his death in 2004. While still an undergraduate and a student in Gunn's poetry writing class, she published poems in Poetry Magazine, one of which won an annual award from Poetry and third prize in the Borestone Mountain anthology "The Best Poems of 1961." That same year, Belle traveled to Greenwich Village where she encountered another recent arrival, Bob Dylan (see "The Day Bob Dylan Came To Call" forthcoming in Big Bridge, autumn 2007). In 1963, together with guitarist John Stauber, she opened The Jabberwock, a caberet in Berkeley.

More recently, Belle is the winner of a 2005-7 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry and Jones Lecturer at Stanford, she is the author of "One Hundred and One Different Ways of Playing Solitaire and Other Poems" (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973), "The Orpheus Sedan" (a chapbook, Copper Canyon Press, 1980), Drop Dead Beautiful (Wood Works Press, 1998), and "True Love" (Wood Works Press, 2002). In 2006 she served as a Panalist for the NEA.

Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, The Threepenny Review, TriQuarterly, The American Poetry Review, and PN Review (England), as well as anthologies such as "Contemporary Religious Poetry" and "A Gift of Tongues." Under the name "Rose Garden Press," Belle designs and produces handmade chapbooks that have been displayed in the Berkeley Arts Center, where she has given readings with Luis Garcia, Thom Gunn, Richard Denner and others. With Richard Denner, she co-edited "Exploding Flowers: The Selected Poems of Luis Garcia" (d-Press, Santa Rosa, 2005). In 2004 she served as Curator for Jack Straw Writers Program, conducting interviews and readings to be aired on public radio.

For twenty years, (1982- 2002) Belle taught literature at Cornish College of the Arts (Seattle) and Advanced Poetry Writing in the University of Washington Extension Writer's Certificate Program. For five summers, she taught a workshop on prosody at Centrum Writers' Conference in Port Townsend, Washington (1984-9). A winner of the 1997 'Pym Cup' from Point-No-Point in Seattle, and a finalist in Seattle's Poet Populist contest (2001), now retired from teaching, Belle continues to write and to be active on the Seattle poetry scene.

She is a founding editor and the Poetry Editor of Common Knowledge, an interdisciplinary journal published by Oxford University Press (1990-1999) and Duke University Press (since 2002). Founded at the fall of the Berlin Wall in an effort to increase communication between Eastern European intellectuals and the west, Common Knowledge now makes its headquartered in Jerusalem, and has become a think tank for non-violent means of conflict resolution. "The Random Murder of Theresa Cha" and "The Anatomy of a Friendship,the Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov" are among the essays she has written for this journal.

Belle has been married for 30 years to Joe Edwards. They have two children, now grown, two parrots and a cat named Mocha. (This entry was updated September 11, 2007).