Risk, Courage, and Women: Contemporary Voices in Prose and Poetry

contributors’ biographies

347 contributors’ biographies Wendy Barker Wendy Barker’s Poems’ Progress (Absey & Co., 2002) is a selection of poems accompanied by autobiographical essays meditating on the process of writing. Her 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 for Translation from the Texas Institute of Letters. Of her three collections of poetry, Way of Whiteness (Wings Press, 2000), received the Violet Crown Book Award, and Let the Ice Speak (Greenfield Review Press, 1991), won the Ithaca House Poetry Prize. Her poems and translations have appeared in magazines including Poetry, The American Scholar, The Kenyon Review, Stand, Partisan Review, and Antioch. As a scholar, she is author of Lunacy of Light: Emily Dickinson and the Experience of Metaphor (1987) as well as co-editor (with Sandra M. Gilbert) of The House is Made of Poetry: The Art of Ruth Stone (1996). Recipient of nea and Rockefeller fellowships as well as other poetry awards, including the Mary Elinore Smith Poetry Prize from The American Scholar, and Gemini Ink’s Award for Literary Excellence, her work has been translated into Hindi, Japanese, and Bulgarian. A Fulbright lecturer in Bulgaria in 2000, she is a professor of English and poet-in-residence at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Kim Barnes I am the daughter of a logger and was raised in the remote logging camps of northern Idaho. I am the author of two memoirs: In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country (Doubleday/Anchor), and Hungry for the World (Villard/Anchor). My first novel, Finding Caruso, was published by Marian Wood Books/Putnam in 2003. I am co-editor, with Mary Clearman Blew, of Circle of Women, an anthology of contemporary western women writers (University of Oklahoma Press). Kiss Tomorrow Hello: Notes from the Midlife Underground by Twenty-Five Women Over Forty, co-edited with Claire Davis, was published by Doubleday in 2006. I received my ba in English from Lewis-Clark State College in 1983, my ma in English from Washington State University in 1985, and my mfa in Creative Writing from the University of Montana in 1995. My work has appeared widely in anthologies and journals, including The Georgia Review, the 2002 Pushcart Prize anthology, and Shenandoah. I am the recipient of two grants (1991, 2001) from the Idaho Commission on the Arts. In 1997, I was honored with a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award for In the Wilderness, which was also a finalist for the pen/Martha Albrand Award, Quality Paperback Book Club’s New Visions Award, and the Pulitzer Risk, Courage, and Women Prize. I teach creative writing and literature at the University of Idaho and live with my husband and children on Moscow Mountain. Isaura Barrera The daughter of Manuel Barrera and Rafaela T. Barrera, my perspective on courage and risk-taking is nested in the courage and risk taking that my parents modeled for me. Not only did they enter a cultural context other than the one they were born into, they also witnessed immense technological change: radios, cars, phones, planes, to name a few. The lessons they modeled for me, both implicitly and explicitly, are interwoven through both my personal and professional life. Personally, I am a Mexican American female with a passionate interest in reading, spirituality, teaching, and the dialectics of communication and paradox. Professionally, I have worked over 25 years in early childhood special education programs in San Antonio, tx and Western New York as well as in New Mexico. Currently I am an associate professor in the Special Education Graduate Program at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. I continue to work as a consultant nationally and have recently co-authored a book entitled Skilled Dialogue: Strategies for Responding to Cultural Diversity in Early Childhood (2003, Paul H. Brookes Publishing). Janice Hosking Brazil I grew up the middle child of a career army soldier and lived in Germany for seven years. There I developed a taste for travel and a sense of adventure. I hold a degree in European history from San Jose State University and my masters from San Jose State. I was in my thirties with two children when I discovered a love for creative writing and began to write poetry as well as essays. Much of my poetry deals with people and places in my life, while my essays revolve around my travels. I have had several pieces published...