Barbara Crooker’s poems have appeared in magazines such as The Green Mountains Review, The Hollins Critic, The Christian Science Monitor, Smartish Pace, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Nimrod, The Denver Quarterly, The Tampa Review, Poetry International, The Christian Century, America and anthologies such as The Bedford Introduction to Literature, Good Poems for Hard Times (Viking Penguin), Boomer Girls (University of Iowa Press), and Commonwealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (Penn State University Press). She is the recipient of the 2007 Pen and Brush Poetry Prize, the 2006 Ekphrastic Poetry Award from Rosebud, the 2004 WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the 2004 Pennsylvania Center for the Book Poetry in Public Places Poster Competition, the 2003 Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, the 2003 “April Is the Cruelest Month” Award from Poets & Writers, the 2000 New Millenium Writing’s Y2K competition, the 1997 Karamu Poetry Award, and others, including three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, fifteen residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; a residency at the Moulin a Nef, Auvillar, France; and a residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, Ireland. A thirty-two time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and five time nominee for Best of the Net, she was a 1997 Grammy Awards Finalist for her part in the audio version of the popular anthology, Grow Old Along With Me–The Best is Yet to Be (Papier Mache Press). Her books are Radiance, which won the 2005 Word Press First Book competition and was a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize; Line Dance, which came out from Word Press in 2008 and won the 2009 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence; More (C&R Press, 2010); and Gold (Cascade Books, a division of Wipf and Stock, in their Poeima Poetry Series, 2013). Her poetry has been read on the BBC, the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Company), and by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac. She has read her poems in the Poetry at Noon series at the Library of Congress, in Auvillar, France, and many other venues.
Barbara Crooker appeared frequently in the old Poetry Life & Times over the last decade & at present her works can be viewed at the New Poetry Life & Times www.artvilla.com/plt I am pleased to introduce yet another and her latest book of poems, which has already received good reviews, so there is little more that I can add to that. robin@artvilla.com editor@artvilla.com