David Barber

David Barber is the author of two collections of poems published by Northwestern University Press:
Wonder Cabinet (2006) and The Spirit Level (1995), the winner of the Terrence Des Pres Prize. He is poetry editor of The Atlantic, where he has been a staff editor since 1994.

He has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and PEN New England. His poems and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times Book Review, The Boston Globe, New England Review, Poetry, Paris Review, The New Republic, Parnassus, The New Criterion, Slate, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. His writing has been anthologized in a number of publications, including The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation (Norton 2011) and The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets (Swallow Press 2009).

Barber has taught writing and literature at Middlebury College, the Harvard Writing Program, MIT’s Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, and the Emerson College graduate writing program. He has also been writer-in-residence at Cornell University, Northwestern University, and Lynchburg College. He has appeared as a guest editor at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference since 2006, and currently serves as a final judge for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize. He also writes on natural history, music, and art.