Guest Poet Wendy Barker Presenting "Craft-Talk" and Reading on Feb. 14

For those interested in poetry, Del Mar College (DMC) will provide two ways to hear guest poet Dr. Wendy Barker read from her latest book on Wednesday, Feb. 14. Either join other poetry aficionados on campus or watch Barker read from One Blackbird at a Time from the comfort of your home or office during a live webcast.

Sponsored by the College’s Cultural Programs and Literary Reading Series, the reading begins at 2 p.m. in Room 514 of the White Library on DMC’s East Campus at Naples off Kosar at Staples. Before the reading, Barker also will present an engaging one-on-one poetry “craft-talk” from noon to 1 p.m. in the same location. Both readings are open to the public. For more information about either activity, contact Sara Kaplan, associate professor of English, at skaplan@delmar.edu.

After the reading, Barker’s poetry collections will be available for purchase and signing.

Del Mar TV will webcast the poetry reading beginning 15 minutes before the 2 p.m. event starts. To view online, go to www.delmar.edu/webcasts/.

Barker’s sixth collection of poetry, One Blackbird at a Time, received the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry. Her fourth chapbook is From the Moon, Earth is Blue (Wings Press, 2015). An anthology, Far Out: Poems of the ‘60s, co-edited with Dave Parsons, was released by Wings Press in 2016.

Other books include a selection of poems with accompanying essays, Poems’ Progress (Absey & Co., 2002), and a collection of translations, Rabindranath Tagore: Final Poems (co-translated with Saranindranath Tagore, George Braziller, 2001). Her poems and translations have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including The Southern Review, Nimrod, New Letters, Poetry, Prairie Schoone and Plume, as well as The Best American Poetry 2013.

Among her recognitions, Barker is a recipient of NEA and Rockefeller residency fellowships, the Writers’ League of Texas Book Award and the Mary Elinore Smith Poetry Prize. She has also been a Fulbright senior lecturer in Bulgaria, and her work has been translated into Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, Russian and Bulgarian.

Barker is the Pearl LeWinn Endowed Professor of Creative Writing and Poet-in-Residence at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she has taught since 1982. She received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Arizona State University in Tempe and a doctoral degree in English from the University of California at Davis.

For more information about Barker, visit www.wendybarker.net.