Francesca Bell

Francesca Bell was born in Spokane, Washington into a family with deep, hardscrabble roots in the Northwest. Her maternal great-grandfather, the son of a prostitute and her client, was raised in a brothel. He raised his own six children, including Bell's grandmother, on a 160-acre homestead in Plummer, Idaho. On her father’s side, the Norwegian Wikum family, when traced 700 years back, was already renowned for its spectacularly heavy drinking. The hard living continued in America where the clan was referred to around Coeur d’ Alene, Idaho as “the fighting Wikums.”

Bell was raised in Washington and Idaho and settled as an adult in California. She did not complete middle school, high school, or college and holds no degrees. She has worked as a massage therapist, a cleaning lady, a daycare worker, a nanny, a barista, and as a server in the kitchen of a retirement home.

Bell’s translations from Arabic and German appear in Arc, Circumference | Poetry in Translation, Massachusetts Review, Mid-American Review, and Rattle. She translated, with Noor Nader Al A’bed, the poetry collection A Love That Hovers Like a Bedeviling Mosquito (Dar Fadaat, 2017), by Palestinian poet Shatha Abu Hnaish.

Bell’s own poems appear widely in magazines such as B O D Y, ELLE, New Ohio Review, North American Review, and Prairie Schooner. She won the 2014 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor from Rattle. She is the board chair of the Marin Poetry Center and the former poetry editor of River Styx. Also to her credit are three luminous and eccentric children, a half-trained beagle, and some very nice blackberry jam.