Barbara Hamby was born in New Orleans and raised in Honolulu. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Yale Review, and The New York Times. She is the author of seven poetry collections including Holoholo (2021), Bird Odyssey (2018), On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems (2014), All-Night Lingo Tango (2009), and Babel (2004). Her second book, The Alphabet of Desire (1999) won the New York University Press Prize for Poetry. Her first book, Delirium (1995), won the Vassar Miller Prize, The Kate Tufts Award, and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation honored Barbara as a 2010 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry. Her short story collection Lester Higata’s 20th Century won the 2010 Iowa Short Fiction Award.

Barbara edited an anthology of poems, Seriously Funny (Georgia, 2009), with her husband David Kirby. She teaches at Florida State University where she is a Distinguished University Scholar.