Posted on September 4, 2025 by Breanna Castillo and Anna Boone
On any given day in her forty years at The University of Texas at San Antonio, you might have found
Wendy Barker leaning forward in a classroom, listening intently as a student read their work aloud. She might have been nodding, smiling, and saying, “Yes, yes,” in that warm, encouraging way her students never forgot. Barker, a poet and professor of English and creative writing who passed away in 2023, had a gift for making each person feel seen. Her legacy lives on in her poetry, in the programs she helped build, and in the lives of her students, colleagues, and her husband, Steven Kellman, an esteemed scholar of comparative literature and professor at UT San Antonio.
Wendy Barker along with her spouse Steven Kellman
On any given day in her forty years at The University of Texas at San Antonio, you might have found
Wendy Barker leaning forward in a classroom, listening intently as a student read their work aloud. She might have been nodding, smiling, and saying, “Yes, yes,” in that warm, encouraging way her students never forgot. Barker, a poet and professor of English and creative writing who passed away in 2023, had a gift for making each person feel seen. Her legacy lives on in her poetry, in the programs she helped build, and in the lives of her students, colleagues, and her husband, Steven Kellman, an esteemed scholar of comparative literature and professor at UT San Antonio.
Barker was born September 22, 1942, in Summit, New Jersey, and grew up in Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona. She earned her undergraduate and master’s degrees from Arizona State University, then completed her doctorate at the University of California at Davis in 1981. While at Davis, she took a course with Sandra Gilbert, a pioneering feminist, scholar, and poet whose encouragement inspired Barker to begin writing her own poetry alongside her academic research. Her first published book, Lunacy of Light, was a scholarly study of Emily Dickinson, whose voice and vision left a lasting mark on Barker’s early poems.
Barker started teaching at UTSA in 1982. With her Department of English colleague, the late
Catherine Kasper, she was one of the key founders of UTSA’s Creative Writing Program, petitioning for its formation, helping to build its foundation and shape its direction. Following her success, Barker was named the Pearl LeWinn Endowed Chair in Creative Writing.
In 1983, Barker established the UTSA Creative Writing Reading Series, persuading the dean to provide just three hundred dollars to host renowned poet Carolyn Forché, whose reading drew more than one hundred enthusiastic attendees. Since the early 1990s, the series has relied entirely on donor support. Over the years, Barker brought many distinguished writers to campus, including Rita Dove, Donald Hall, Denise Levertov, Mary Oliver, and Alberto Ríos.
The series continues today, welcoming acclaimed voices from across the country and around the world to share their work through public readings and to engage directly with students. Widely respected within literary circles, Barker’s friendships with prominent poets and writers often helped bring these celebrated figures to UTSA.
In her lifetime Barker was recipient of an NEA fellowship, a Rockefeller residency fellowship in Bellagio, as well as other awards in poetry, including the twice received Writers’ League of Texas Book Award for her book Way of Whiteness in 2000 and for Between Frames in 2007 and the Mary Elinore Smith Poetry Prize from The American Scholar. She was a Fulbright senior lecturer in Bulgaria.
Her work has been translated into Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and Bulgarian.
Barker gave UTSA 40 years of expertise, wisdom, and love before passing away at the age of 80 in 2023. She often said that love was one of the guiding virtues in her teaching.
“She established a relationship one on one with each of them. with each of them. She was beloved by several generations of students, some of whom have gone on to become poets themselves and she kept in touch with many of them over the years. I think her philosophy, if we want to put it in those terms, of teaching, was to be a mentor, a friend, and an inspiration to her students,” said Kellman.
Barker’s influence reached far beyond the classroom, quietly shaping the lives and voices of those she taught. Natalia Treviño, a former student of Wendy’s who is now an instructor herself at Northwest Vista College in San Antonio, revealed that Wendy taught her to “Teach with love. Teach human beings, not material. Look at the people in the room and how the lesson is working on them, with them.”
Zachary Sokoloski, a former student and current PhD candidate in UT San Antonio’s English program, remembered Barker as a professor who balanced warmth with strength. “She brought warmth and compassion to the classroom, listening closely and responding with encouragement that made each of us feel truly heard,” Sokoloski said. “She could be gentle and kind, but also stern and fierce, and even the fierceness came from a place of love. She was just helping everyone be the best they could possibly be.”
Sokoloski said her values, evident both in her poetry and her teaching, inspired students to speak thoughtfully on behalf of their communities. He also noted her fondness for Theodore Roethke’s poem “The Waking,” seeing a connection between its central line, “I learn by going where I have to go,” and the way she encouraged others to follow their own paths.
Wendy empowered her students with the tools to look deeper, to speak truth, and to trust their voices. Sokoloski and Treviño are just two of the many lives Wendy Barker touched. We can imagine the ripple effect across the countless students, colleagues, and friends who had the privilege of knowing her.
“I first met Wendy when I interviewed for the English faculty job in early 2019--she met me in the lobby of my hotel and immediately opened her arms to hug me, even though we were strangers. We laughed about that when I began teaching here that fall. From the beginning she was a generous, supportive colleague and friend, and I could tell a fabulous teacher. I still see the ripples of her mentorship around San Antonio and beyond, in so many poets and writers and artists I’ve met,” stated
Kimberly Garza, professor and current Director of the Creative Writing program at UT San Antonio.
The program offers a Certificate in Creative Writing at the undergraduate and graduate levels, an undergraduate concentration in the English BA, and a creative writing thesis track for English MA students.
“The Creative Writing Program is thriving. We have a steady demand for more workshops, more events, across the university and San Antonio in the community. Creative Writing students at all levels, graduate and undergraduate, come to class already loving writing--they’re skilled and enthusiastic poets and story writers, excited to learn more and engage with other people who love this craft. I’m proud to help run the program that Wendy and Catherine created and excited to see it grow and flourish in their honor.” stated Garza.
Barker’s work lives on in her book “The Complete Poems” which was edited by her husband and features an introduction by acclaimed scholar and translator Ilan Stavans. It was published by LSU Press in 2025. The expansive collection presents the life’s work of a steadily productive, brilliant poet and beloved teacher.
“I think the marvelous thing about this book of 500 or so poems is the enormous variety of it all. I think you could say that she’s very much influenced by her involvement in the natural world. She writes about birds, about clouds, and about trees. But she also writes about her experiences as a teacher, particularly at UTSA. I think some of her strongest poems are about being in the classroom right here at UTSA and teaching our students the poems that she loves. And those poems are about not only about those poems, but about the interaction of teacher and student,” explained Kellman.
Wendy Barker’s “The Complete Poems” is available online and can be purchased at lsupress.org.
— Breanna Castillo and Anna Boone
