Eleanor Bell, a freelance writer and editor, has lived in Topeka, Kansas, since 1975. Born in Wichita in 1929, she earned her BA degree from Friends University in 1950. She is currently design and copy editor of the national award-winning Journal of Radio Studies. She has been a contributing editor to a number of publications, and her poetry has been published in Inscape and other literary magazines.

Flights Through Inner Space was originally published in 1980. Editor Robert Lawson says of this reprint: "The qualities of Eleanor's poetry remain the same — a nice sense of control, patterns imposed by the subject, carefully thought out ideas, so that the poet is frequently provoking you to think about something again (though she will seldom overtly attempt to persuade), and, finally, presiding over all of this, a sense of language that is genuinely poetic, from the title metaphor to the patterns of alliteration in an individual poem. "

Cycle ride

Tonight I fly beyond the speed of dreams
and feel earth fall away beneath my feet,
escape the grasp of time and rush to meet
the burnished liquid-silver stars whose gleams
drip silently into black icy streams
of night. My circling arms corral the heat
of you nested against me on the seat.
The incandescent eye propels its beams
hollowing a tunnel through the night,
and gazing past your helmet I can see
an earthy realm of sensuous delight
where spirits ride the wild wind's ecstasy.
Now reaching out, I catch a dream in flight
to give you as a souvenir of me.