Wendy Barker’s novel in prose poems, Nothing Between Us: The Berkeley Years (runner-up for the Del Sol Prize) was released by Del Sol Press in 2009. The book was a finalist for the 2010 Texas Institute of Letters’ Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Best Book of Poetry.
Earlier full-length collections of poetry include 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 has also published three chapbooks, Things of the Weather (Pudding House Press, 2009), Between Frames (Pecan Grove Press, 2006) and Eve Remembers (Aark Arts, 1996). 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 many journals, including Poetry, Southern Review, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, The American Scholar, The Kenyon Review, Nimrod, Stand, Partisan Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Antioch and Southern Poetry Review.
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, and her work is frequently anthologized.
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 at 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. She is Poet-in Residence and a professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Wendy has one son, Dave Barker, and is married to the critic and biographer Steven G. Kellman.