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