Wendy Barker, Ph.D.
Bio
Wendy Barker's Weave: New and Selected Poems, (BkMk Press, 2022), follows seven full-length collections of poetry, most recently being Gloss, published by Saint Julian Press in 2020. Her collection One Blackbird at a Time was chosen for the John Ciardi Prize and was published by BkMk Press in 2015. Earlier books 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 sixth chapbook is Those Roads, These Moons, (forthcoming from Alabrava Press, 2023). Her fifth chapbook, Shimmer, was published in 2019 by Glass Lyre Press. An anthology, Far Out: Poems of the 60s, co-edited with David M. Parsons, was 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 hundreds of journals, including Poetry, The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Plume, Rattle, The American Scholar, The Kenyon Review, Nimrod, Stand, Partisan Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Plume, New Letters, 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). Many poems have been reprinted in various venues, including the Academy of American Poetry site poets.org. 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 in 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. Poet-in-Residence and the Pearl Lewinn Endowed Chair at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she has taught since 1982, Wendy is married to the critic, biographer, and poet Steven G. Kellman.
Teaching
Undergraduate
- Senior Seminar: Language and Landscape in American Poetry
- Advanced Creative Writing: Poetry
- Modern Fiction
Graduate
- Creative Writing: Poetry
- Topics in American Literature: Ecocriticism and American Poetry
- Topics in Literary Genres: Poetry
Research Interests
- Poetry and creative writing
- Nineteenth and twentieth-century literature
- Women's studies.
