Judy Bebelaar loved teaching in San Francisco public high schools for 37 years, where she nurtured young poets and writers in her classes, many of them winning writing prizes, including eight on the national level. As a co-founder of Opportunity I and II, public alternative schools, never could she, or really any of the educators then, have imagined that literally dozens of the Opportunity students would die in the tragedy of Jonestown under the twisted spell of Jim Jones of the People’s Temple.
And Then They Were Gone: Teenagers of Peoples Temple from High School to Jonestown is about the Temple students she and Ron Cabral came to know at Opportunity II in 1976. In it, she tells the stories of these young people, sharing their poetry and the stories of who they were, commemorating their tragically too-short lives. The book has won 10 honors and awards including 4 first prizes, the most recent from Chanticleer/the Nelly Bly Award for journalistic writing.
Judy’s award-winning poetry has been published widely in magazines and anthologies, and in a chapbook, Walking Across the Pacific. She currently serves as Teacher Consultant with UC Berkeley’s Bay Area Writing Project.
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