Barbara Lightner is a prize-winning poet who began writing poetry in law school to escape the tension and boredom of death by law. She grew up in rural Tennessee among sharecroppers and cotton magnates, hardscrabble farmers, one aristocrat and one country doctor.
She has taught creative writing and contemporary poetry at UW-Madison and Skagit Valley College. Her poetry has appeared in Verse Wisconsin, OccuPoetry, Table Rock Review, New Verse News, Come Be a Memoirist, and the feminist anthology Letters to the World. She has performed several of her poems in various venues, including the UWM-Madison Women’s Studies Program, UWM-Stevens Point, the Milwaukee Public Library and the Woodland Pattern Book Center.
She lives in Milwaukee, WI.