Judy Bebelaar taught English and creative writing for 37 years in public high schools in San Francisco, California, and has received national recognition for her success in helping students find joy in writing their lives. In 2018, she co- authored a non-fiction book with fellow teacher Ron Cabral. Together they tell the story of the People’s Temple teenagers they came to teach, know, and love, And Then They Were Gone: Teenagers of Peoples Temple from High School to Jonestown. The book has won ten honors and awards, including four first prizes; Ron and Judy were named San Francisco Library Laureates. Her poetry has won many awards as well. Judy’s poems have been published in over fifty literary journals and her work also appears in six anthologies including The Widows’ Handbook (foreword by Ruth Bader Ginsburg), the Marin Poetry Center Anthology, Getting the News, 2017; and California Fire and Water (ed. Molly Fisk, Story Street Press, 2020) Her poetry book, Sky Holding Fall, was published in 2023. From the back cover: Sky Holding Fall “explores grief and its passage with a voice that is both brave and expansive. These poems surmount the paradox of what cannot be said,/but must be said, not only with unflinching scrutiny, but more importantly, with lyrical deftness and a painterly eye, moving effortlessly between the narrative and the metaphorical. Judy Bebelaar confronts both personal pain and the joy of life with a poetic eye and cosmic grace.” Jeanne Wagner, author of One Needful Song. Sky Holding Fall, Judy Bebelaar’s long-awaited collection, holds all the great subjects—life and death, love and loss, light and dark. But always, even as she acknowledges the darkest moments—her mother’s depression, her young husband’s death to cancer, her own cancer, the world’s difficult truths—Bebelaar returns us to light. Through keenly observed images and a richness of particulars —surf boards, pill bottles filled with buttons, a woman’s prayer stone, a hand- hewn cedar bed—Bebelaar makes us see what it means to live life fully in all its “sad lovely tumult.” Her poems comfort and console even as they challenge us to live our own lives just as fully and fearlessly as we find life’s “small miracles,” which Bebelaar offers us over and over again in these beautifully accomplished poems. Lynne Knight, author of The Language of Forgetting In Judy Bebelaar’s poem, “Bitter Tea,” she says, “pain becomes a teacher.” The Chinese have a saying, “Eat bitter,” that is, learn to endure the pain, and this powerful new collection has plenty of that: a chronically depressed mother, a beloved husband who dies too young, the assault of breast cancer. When Judy says, “how can any of us/say the ways/we are changed,” she means changed by irrefutable mortality and its ravages. And yet Sky Holding Fall is one long lyrical saying—let’s call it testimony—to how we survive those changes: through cherishable memory, through the felicities of simple pleasures, and most of all through the love of everything that is still here to be loved. As well as this welcome reminder: “…sometimes,” she says, “it is possible/to make our own miracles.” Thomas Centolella, author of Almost Human