Barbara Hamby was born in New Orleans and raised in Hawai’i. She now lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with her husband, the sublime poet and all-around molto fun guy, David Kirby. She teaches creative writing in the English Department at Florida State University.
Professional Biography for Barbara Hamby
2010 was a big year. Barbara Hamby’s book of stories, Lester Higata’s 20th Century, won the Iowa Short Fiction Prize/John Simmons Award, she was named a Distinguished University Scholar at Florida State, and she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. She also published Seriously Funny, an anthology of poetry that she co-edited with her husband David Kirby, and Amy Gerstler chose five of her Lingo Sonnets for Best American Poetry 2010.
Her other books are:
All-Night Lingo Tango (University of Pittsburgh Press: 2009;
Babel, which was chosen by Stephen Dunn to win the 2003 Associated Writing Programs Donald Hall Prize and was also published by Pittsburgh;
The Alphabet of Desire, which won the 1998 New York University Prize for Poetry and was published by NYU Press in May 1999 (The New York Public Library chose The Alphabet of Desire as one of the 25 best books of 1999);
Delirium, which won the 1994 Vassar Miller Prize and two prizes for the best first book of poems published in 1995, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award.
Hamby received a fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1996. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2000, 2009, and 2010 and the Pushcart Prize Anthology 2001.
She has been teaching in the Creative Writing Program at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida, since 1998. In Spring 2009 she was a visiting professor at the University of Houston.
