A poet, memoirist, essayist, and teacher with a perspective shaped by the rural South and urban centers of the US and Europe

  • Wendy Barnes’ first full-length volume of poems, Landscape with Bloodfeud, was a finalist for the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award and was awarded the Juniper Prize for Poetry from the University of Massachusetts Press (2022). 

    Her poems have appeared in publications like Narrative, storySouth, Painted Bride Quarterly, No, Dear, Spoon River Review, and Slice Magazine. Her art and literary reviews appear in publications like Frog magazine and The Adroit Journal. She received a Fellowship in Prose from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts for her memoir-in-progress, The Hunger Year. She will be a resident at T.S. Eliot House in Summer 2025.

    An associate professor of English at Union College in Elizabeth, NJ, she recently served as Visiting Artist-in-Residence at the University of Central Oklahoma.

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“In the parish/ of our unquenchable dirt,/there is no bottom”

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Raised working-class in the rural South, I have spent my adult life in urban centers of the United States, France, and the Netherlands. A transcultural perspective has led to my interest in examining our cultural inheritances—the ways people navigate the world carrying them as both blessings and burdens.

  • See Wendy’s list of poetry publications here. 

    To return to the city,
    at least one of the mind,

    the weather beaten town,
    the bay of the mind,
    its toxic islands.

    To return to the rim
    of a childhood
    landscape—a coastline

    even as it blurs,
    disappears in cubic feet—
    is to expose your own
    composition, reveal your basic dirt.

    I want to go back,
    to stay what escapes
    its own outline,

    grab a few handfuls
    of silt.   

        -from “Barataria Bay, Louisiana”

  • Read about Wendy’s approach to prose on her blog here. 

    “The mythical equal marriage is like the rare binary planet, two planets of roughly the same mass caught in a peaceful orbit of each other.

    In reality, this stasis can only last so long before someone needs to be the center, the sun that pulls the other planet roughly into its own field force of priorities, feelings, plans.”

    -from The Hunger Year, a memoir in progress

“In poems that reveal a microcosm of the U.S. in her home state of Louisiana, Barnes not only critiques the rise of environmental exploitation and racial capitalism, but also confronts the moral questions that critics of these social systems face: how are we complicit in the violence that engulfs us, and can we create a different culture by facing a truer history of our own lives?”

—Amy Klein, “A Poet of the American Storm,” Poetry Northwest