For 37 years,Judy Bebelaarenjoyedteaching intheSan Francisco public high schools.She especiallylovedteaching creative writing,finding it to be the best way toreach her students andto encouragethem to get to knowand understand one another. Over the years, herstudents won many awards,bothlocally and on thenational level, including the NationalScholastic Writing Contest. In 2000, when eight of her students became winners,Judywas awarded a national prize from Scholasticto honor the excellence ofher teaching.Herpoetry has been published widely in magazines and in nine anthologies,includingThe Widows Handbook(Kent State University Press;forward by RuthBader Ginsburg). A chapbook,Walking Across the Pacific, was published in 2014(Finishing Line Press),and in 2023, a full-length poetry book,Sky Holding Fall, was published by Blue Light Press.A nonfiction book written with Ron Cabral,And Then They Were Gone: Teenagers of Peoples Templefrom High School to Jonestown(Sugartown Press, 2018),has won tenhonors and awards, among them four first prizes,and bothRon and Judywerenamed San Francisco Library Laureates.

PRAISE:

Judy Bebelaars new collection of poetry lets the calm continual turning at the center of Rumis spirit move us again, through delicate observations of love, mortality, and natures joys. Reflections of her husband, lost to cancer decades ago, are particularly poignant, yet all the poems navigate time and place beautifully, and can be likened, as she says at the end of Aspen, to roots below the clone/(that) flow in Rumis rings.

Eliot Schain, author of The Distant Sound

Judy Bebelaars poems are a meditation on lifes persistence as she invites us into her dance with the Sufi poet, Rumi. Bebelaar isnt shy about combining grief and joy, unimaginable loss and the embrace of the summer-soft hills. She recalls the fat fruit of an apricot tree and her husband, Johns, lean, tanned body. Both man and tree are gone; still, Bebelaar admits to a strange elation in just being here. . . surging forward. Her quiet acceptance rubs off on us, and we feel calmer, grateful for the time weve spent with her. In the final poem of this exquisite collection, she asks for more days, please, more life.

Katharine Harer, author of Deconfliction

In Ruminations, Judy Bebelaar uses quotations from Rumi as the starting points for exquisite poems that reflect her own experiences of love, loss, and awe. Beauty and wonder abound in these poems: This flock of birds, / their wings dark knives / cutting sapphire. In poems at once sturdy and delicate, Bebelaar reminds us to hang onto hope in our troubled world: In spite of missing birds / and poisoned bees, / Spring still holds her promises.

Lucille Lang Day, author of Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place