For the month of June, our literary artist of the month is Cathy Barber. Cathy Barber’s work has been widely published. A partial list of publications includes The San Francisco Bay Guardian, West Trestle Review, Kestrel, Literary Mama, paper wasp, Presence, Sierra Nevada College Review, AIM, Concho River Review, SLAB, Ballyhoo Stories, The Dos Passos Review, Sweet, and Tattoo Highway.

Additionally her work has appeared in several anthologies, most notably, An Eye For An Eye Makes the Whole World Blind: Poets on 9/11, which won the 2003 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles National Literary Award; Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California; and The Cancer Poetry Project Vol. 2, which won the Best Poetry Book of 2013, Midwest Book Awards

Ms. Barber’s work has received individual awards as well, including second place in the S. Portia Steele Memorial Award for Excellence in Poetry (2006) and second place in Gin Bender’s 2003 poetry contest. In 2016, her “Three Short Love Poems” was nominated for a Best of the Net award.

She has three chapbooks, two self-published and the third, Aardvarks, Bloodhounds, Catfish, Dingoes, published by Dancing Girl Press, 2018. A fourth manuscript was a quarter finalist in the 2014 Vine Leaves Vignette Collection contest. She is currently finishing a full length collection.

She has an MA in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from California State University, East Bay, and an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.  She taught for many years with California Poets in the Schools and served on the board. She has also served on the board of Literary Cleveland for two years.