Wendy Barker

Wendy Barker’s sixth full-length collection of poems, One Blackbird at a Time (BkMk Press, 2015), was chosen for The John Ciardi Prize. Earlier book collections include her novel in prose poems, Nothing Between Us: The Berkeley Years (runner-up for the Del Sol Prize and released by Del Sol Press in 2009); Poems from Paradise (WordTech, 2005); Way of Whiteness (Wings Press, 2000); Let the Ice Speak (Ithaca House, 1991); and Winter Chickens (Corona Publishing Co., 1990).

Wendy’s fourth chapbook is From the Moon, Earth is Blue (Wings Press, 2015). Earlier chapbooks include Things of the Weather (Pudding House Press, 2009); Between Frames (Pecan Grove Press, 2006); and Eve Remembers (Aark Arts, 1996). An anthology, Far Out: Poems of the 60s, co-edited with David M. Parsons, will be published in 2016 by Wings Press. A selection of poems accompanied by autobiographical essays, Poems’ Progress (Absey & Co.), appeared in 2002, and a collection of translations (with Saranindranath Tagore) from the Bengali of India’s Nobel Prize-winning poet, Rabindranath Tagore: Final Poems (George Braziller, 2001), received the Sourette Diehl Fraser Award from the Texas Institute of Letters.

Wendy’s poems and translations have appeared in many journals, including Poetry, Southern Review, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, The American Scholar, The Kenyon Review, Nimrod, Stand, Partisan Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Antioch and Southern Poetry Review. Her work has also appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2013 (eds. Denise Duhamel and David Lehman). Essays have appeared in such magazines as Poets & Writers and Southwest Review. She has read her poetry at dozens of universities, bookstores, festivals, and conferences in the United States, Europe, and in India.

As a scholar, she is the author of Lunacy of Light: Emily Dickinson and the Experience of Metaphor (Southern Illinois University Press, 1987) as well as co-editor (with Sandra M. Gilbert) of The House is Made of Poetry: The Art of Ruth Stone (Southern Illinois University Press, 1996).

Recipient of an NEA fellowship, a Rockefeller residency fellowship at Bellagio, as well as other awards in poetry, including the Writers’ League of Texas Book Award (which she has received twice, for Way of Whiteness in 2000 and for Between Frames in 2007) and the Mary Elinore Smith Poetry Prize from The American Scholar, she has also been a Fulbright senior lecturer in Bulgaria. Her work has been translated into Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and Bulgarian. She is Poet-in-Residence and the Pearl LeWinn Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Wendy has one son, Dave Barker, and is married to the critic and biographer Steven G. Kellman.