Tina Barr ’73 will highlight 2019 Bergan Poetry Festival

Barr’s most recent collection of poems, Green Target, was published this fall and won the Barrow Street Press Book Prize, judged by Patricia Spears Jones. Previous publications include Kaleidoscope (2015) and The Gathering Eye (2004), winner of the Tupelo Press Editor’s Award, as well as three award-winning chapbooks. Her works have been published in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, and she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Tennessee Arts Commission, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

A Long Island, NY, native, Barr was encouraged to pursue her love of poetry when the noted poet and Alison Harrison Goodyear '29 Fellow Archibald MacLeish visited Foxcroft and subsequently critiqued some of her work. She went on to receive a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, an M.F.A. from Columbia University's School of the Arts in New York in 1982, and her M.A. (1987) and Ph.D. (1995) degrees in English from Temple University in Philadelphia. She taught at Temple University and the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and was director of the Creative Writing Program at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN, for more than a decade. Now a resident of Black Mountain, NC, Barr continues to teach poetry through the Great Smokies Writing Program.