Wendy Barker

Wendy Barker's sixth collection of poetry, winner of the John Ciardi Prize, is One Blackbird at a Time (BkMk Press, 2015). Her fourth chapbook of poems is From the Moon, Earth is Blue (Wings Press, 2015). An anthology of poems about the 1960s, Far Out: Poems of the '60s, co-edited with Dave Parsons, was released by Wings Press in 2016. Among her other books are Poems’ Progress (Absey & Co., 2002), and a selection of co-translations, Rabindranath Tagore: Final Poems (Braziller, 2001). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2013.  Recipient of NEA and Rockefeller fellowships, she is Poet-in-Residence and the Pearl LeWinn Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

"Wendy Barker’s One Blackbird at a Time is one of the most personable, entertaining and moving books of poetry I’ve read in a long time. To say it’s about a writer teaching literature is to mistake the book’s occasion for its subject, which is nothing less than the myriad ways poetry and fiction can illuminate our loves and losses, and in doing so teach us how outrage, lament and intimacy are all forms of celebration, on and off the page, and in and out of the classroom." -- Alan Shapiro, author of Reel to Reel and Night of the Republic.

"Wendy Barker's poems share her exquisite gift for seeing deeply into, through, and out of things –with precision, lush embodiment, and exacting elegance. They freshen our own vision—tonics of sheer restoration." -- Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Tansfer and 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East