Barbara Crooker

Barbara Crooker - Barbara Crooker was born in Cold Spring, New York, in 1945, but currently resides in Fogelsville, Pennsylvania. She began writing poetry in the late 1970s. Her poetry, for which she has won many awards, incorporates themes of nature, home, family, love, loss, and disability. Her poems have been published in anthologies and magazines, as well as compiled in several chapbooks and books including The Lost Children, Ordinary Life, and Greatest Hits, 1980-2002. Crooker continues to write, to read her poetry, to teach workshops, and to speak about the venues available for publishing poetry.

Barbara Crooker’s poems appear in magazines and anthologies, including The Bedford Introduction toLiterature (Bedford/St. Martin’s), Poetry: an Introduction (Bedford/St. Martin’s), and GoodPoems for Hard Times (Garrison Keillor, editor)(Viking Penguin) Her full-length books are Radiance, which won the 2005 Word Press First Book Award and was a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize; Line Dance (Word Press, 2008), which won the 2009 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence; and More (C&R Press, 1010). She has received three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships in Literature and won the 2003 Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award (Stanley Kunitz, judge).