Belle Randall

Belle Randall attended the University of California (Berkeley), where the poet Thom Gunn was her Freshman English teacher (1960). Her poetry first appeared in Poetry magazine while she was still an undergraduate. A decade later, she was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford, where she completed her first full-length book of poems"One Hundred and One Different Ways of Playing Solitaire," published in 1973 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals--Poetry, The Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, Triquarterly and PN Review (England). Her chapbooks "Drop Dead Beautiful" and "True Love" were published in 1997 and 2003 respectively by Wood Works Press. Retired from the University of Washington and Cornish College of the Arts, where she taught for 20 years, she lives in Seattle with her husband Joe Edwards, two small parrots and a Bengal cat. She is still active as a poet and as Poetry Editor of Common Knowledge (Duke University Press). In 2005, she was awarded a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. Her most recent book is "The Coast Starlight," just out from David Roberts Books (September, 2010).

Praise for Belle Randall's poetry:

"After the second reading I felt as if I had been through a whole novel, as well, at the same time, as a book of philosophical thinking of the kind I love most." Stanley Cavell