September 4, 2025
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.