Barnstone, Aliki

Poet.

Catherine Barnstone was educated at Brown University (B.A. and M.A.) and at the University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D.). Her volume of poems, The Real Tin Flower, introduced by Anne Sexton (Macmillan), was published when she was twelve years old. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, New Letters, The New York Times, Ms., Agni, Chicago Review, The Antioch Review, and other journals, and she is co-editor of the anthology A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now (Schocken/Random House). At present she is editing the forthcoming volume, Voices of Light: Women's Spiritual Poetry from around the World (Shambhala). She teaches at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. Gerald Stern has compared Barnstone's work to Emily Dickinson's: "Not in the forms, not, as such, in the music, and not in the references; but in that weird intimacy, that eerie closeness, that absolute confession of soul. . . .In Barnstone (too) the two worlds are intensely present, and the voice moves back and forth between them. She has the rare art of distance and closeness. It gives her her fine music, her wisdom, her form. She is a fine poet."

Biographical Source: http://web.whittier.edu/barnstone/aliki.html and http://www.poetrymagazine.com/archives/2002/April2002/barnstone.htm 2007