June 16, 2011

Belle Randall attended the University of California (Berkeley), where the poet Thom Gunn was her Freshman English teacher (1960). A decade later, she was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford, where she completed her first full-length book of poems, 101 Different Ways of Playing Solitaire, published in 1973 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals: Poetry, Threepenny Review, Triquarterly, and PN Review (England). In 2005–7, she received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry. Retired from teaching at Cornish College of the Arts and the University of Washington, she continues her work as the poetry editor of Common Knowledge (Duke University Press, 1990–present). Belle’s website is http://www.prosody.org.

Anita K. Boyle is an illustrator and graphic designer who has spent her lifetime as a dedicated denizen of the Pacific Northwest. During a Willard R. Espy Foundation literary residency in 2003, she wrote sixty poems, and still had time for small talk with a coyote. Boyle is author of the chapbook Bamboo Equals Loon (Egress Studio Press, 2001). Her poems have appeared in literary magazines, including StringTown, The Raven Chronicles, Crab Creek Review, Cranky, Indiana Review, Spoon River Review, Mudlark, Margin, Mirror Northwest, and in the anthologies Red Sky Morning and Saints of Hysteria. She lives near an inspiring pond outside Bellingham, Washington, with her poet-friend-partner James Bertolino—who she has collaborated with on two chapbooks of poetry. Egress Studio (http://www.egressstudio.com) is a short jog from the house, where she can be found happily doing the same new things every day.