Audio Interview Part I, Part II

Welcome to
Barbara Crooker's
Home Page

Barbara Crooker's poems have appeared in magazines such as The Sun, 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 Pen and Brush Poetry Prize, the Ekphrastic Poetry Award from Rosebud, the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Pennsylvania Center for the Book Poetry in Public Places Poster Competition, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, the "April Is the Cruelest Month" Award from Poets & Writers, the 2000 New Millenium Writing's Y2K competition, the Karamu Poetry Award, and others, including three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, twenty-one residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; two residencies at the Moulin a Nef, Auvillar, France; and two residencies at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, Ireland. A sixty-one time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and seven 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); Gold (Cascade Books, a division of Wipf and Stock, in their Poeima Poetry Series, 2013); Small Rain (Virtual Artists Collective, 2014); Selected Poems, (FutureCycle Press, 2015); Les Fauves (C&R Press, 2017); The Book of Kells (Cascade Books, 2018, winner of the Best Poetry Book 2018 from Poetry by the Sea); and Some Glad Morning (Pitt Poetry Series, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), which was long listed for the Julie Suk Award, and Slow Wreckage(Grayson Books, 2024). Her poetry has been read on the BBC, the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Company), by Garrison Keillor on The Writer's Almanac, by US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith on The Slowdown podcast, and in Ted Kooser's column, American Life in Poetry. She has been an invited reader in the Poetry at Noon series at the Library of Congress; the Halle aux Grains, Auvillar, France; the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival; Poetry @ Roundtop; the SoCal Poetry Festival; the Festival of Faith and Writing; The Scissortail Poetry Festival; Glory Days: A Bruce Springsteen Symposium; Poetry by the Sea; and many other venues. A number of her poems have been set to music and performed at various places by groups like The LA Master Chorale (Walt Disney Concert Hall) and The Esoterics (Seattle, WA), who performed A Calendar of Light, 22 of her poems set to music by Dale Trumbore.