Biography
Beryle (“Bea”) Williams, born in Iowa, where she attended Cornell College, lived in Colorado and Minnesota, before returning to Colorado in 1992. She lives with her husband, William, in Estes Park. She was awarded a Writing Fellowship by the Minnesota State Arts Board, served on the board of Minnesota Literature, and on the Awards Committee for The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. With professor George Appel, she coordinated “Poetry Under the Arch” at Hamline University, presenting readings by notable writers from throughout the US and elsewhere. Since the late 1960s, she has given readings in colleges, including among others the University of Minnesota, Macalester, St. Catherines, Michigan Tech, and in art galleries and entertainment centers, such as the Walker Art Center, The Loft, Guild of Performing Arts, Theater in the Round, and in coffee houses, libraries, for political rallies, on radio stations, etc.
Williams has served as creative writing critic, judge, workshop leader and teacher, working with students in schools, elementary through college, in adult workshops including a prison, and with both students and teachers at Beijing University in China, where she also taught conversational English for a half year. For a number of years, she worked as a book review editor and columnist for a newspaper, and a fiction and poetry editor for a journal, and has been associated with various writing groups, from a poetry collective at the Poetry Center in London, and organizations in the US with a serious concern for conventional form in poetry, to the “Ithunn Apple Occasional Poets’ Collective”--dedicated to getting poets out of old patterns and poetic egos. She was a founding member of Women Poets of the Twin Cities and, more recently, the Trail Ridge Writers in Estes Park, serving as editor on anthologies for both groups. In 2003, she published “Old-Love Poems: Commemorating A Long Love Affair”. Her work has appeared in various anthologies (see separate listing) and journals and magazines including: THEMA; Buffalo Bones; South Dakota Review; Lake Street Review; Dacotah Territory; The North Country Anvil; Milkweed Chronicle; Anna’s House; The Northfield Magazine; Wyoming, The Hub of The Wheel; WARM Journal; and Anthropology and Humanism.
