Celeste De Blasis (May 8, 1947 - April 13, 2001)

Celeste N. De Blasis was born on May 8, 1946 in Santa Monica, California. She grew up at the Kemper Campbell Ranch in Victorville, California located in the high Mojave Desert. She was the daughter Jean De Blasis. Jean De Blasis and Joseph Campbell are the children of author Mrs. Kemper Campbell (Litta Belle Campbell). Joseph, who passed away in 1990, was a Superior Court judge. Jean served as a councilwoman in Victorville. Celeste De Blasis attended Wellesley College, later transferred to Oregon State University, and in 1968 was graduated from Pomona College where longing to be back home at the ranch had drawn her. She continued to live on the ranch until her death of cancer on April 13, 2001.

Celeste De Blasis was published in a number of poetry magazines, including "Manifold" (London), "Kauri" and "Sandcutters". In 1969 she was given the Southern Division National League of Pen Women Award for Letters for her poetry.

Celeste was grateful to her parents for the adventures they enabled her to have abroad, "among the loveliest of the many gifts they gave my brother and me," she said. "Born in this country of immigrant parents, my father is European in ways even he himself does not understand," she explained. "He has a sense of the world as a vast, continuous treasure house of man's history. And my mother's view is identical."

( Read more... )

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celeste_De_Blasis


Cover Art by Max Ginsburg