Wendy Barker

Wendy Barker (September 22, 1942 – March 11, 2023) was an American poet.

Barker was born September 22, 1942, in Summit, New Jersey, but grew up in Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona.

Barker also taught high school English in Scottsdale, Arizona, between 1966–68 and in Berkeley, between 1968 and 1972.

She was married to the critic Steven G. Kellman.

Between 1968 and 1982 she lived in Berkeley, California.

She received her B.A. and M.A. from Arizona State University and her Ph.D. in 1981 from the University of California at Davis.

She was Poet-in-Residence and the Pearl LeWinn Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she taught since 1982.

Barker's fifth collection of poems, Nothing Between Us: The Berkeley Years, a novel in prose poems set in Berkeley in the sixties (Del Sol Press, 2009), has been described as "unforgettably moving" by Sandra M. Gilbert; "a captivating page-turner" by Alicia Ostriker; and an "exciting tribute to a decade of change" by Denise Duhamel.

Barker died on March 11, 2023, at the age of 80.

Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2013.

Translations (with Saranindranath Tagore) of Rabindranath Tagore have appeared in such places as Partisan Review, The Kenyon Review, Stand, Puerto del Sol, and The Hollins Critic.

Translations (with Amritjit Singh) of the Punjabi poet Gurcharan Rampuri have appeared in The Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad.

Personal essays have appeared in Poets & Writers, Southwest Review, and the online journal Cerise Press: A Journal of Literature, Arts & Culture.

Recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation, her work has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Russian, and Bulgarian.

One Blackbird at a Time, Alan Shapiro says, "is one of the most personable, entertaining and moving books of poetry I've read in a long time".

Ken Prufer describes the poems as "rich, complex, and shimmering with energy and intelligence."

"A wonderful book of poems" that are "full of ferocity and rapture, a joy to read," states Alicia Ostriker

Her sixth collection of poems is One Blackbird at a Time, winner of the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry (BkMk Press, 2015).

Her fourth chapbook is From the Moon, Earth is Blue (Wings Press, 2015).

An anthology, Far Out: Poems of the 60s, co-edited with David M. Parsons, was published by Wings Press in 2016.

She has also published a selection of poems with accompanying drafts and essays about the writing process.

Her translations (with Saranindranath Tagore) of Nobel Prize-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore received the Sourette Diehl Fraser Award from the Texas Institute of Letters.

Barker’s poems have appeared in such journals as Poetry, The American Scholar, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, The Southern Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Harpur Palate, The Marlboro Review, The Laurel Review, and Boulevard.