barbara Lefcowitz

Barbara Lefcowitz has recieved writing fellowships and prizes from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation and Maryland Arts Council, among others. Her fiction and essays have appeared in over 400 journals. A native of New York, she obtained a Bachelor of Arts from Smith College, a Masters in English from State University of NY in Buffalo and a Ph. D. in English from the University of Maryland.

Recently retired from her professorship of English at Anne Arundel Community College in Maryland, Lefcowitz is also a visual artist who creates collages and silk paintings, studies languages and has educated herself in astronomy and neurology. Teacher, world traveler and a prolific writer of poetry, fiction and experimental essays, her work is a reflection of her life, the arts, science, memory and the landscape of the mind. A self-described loner, she distances herself from the current self-defined literary schools and feels that university-based creative-writing programs in America are more problematic than helpful to aspiring writers.

Barbara Lefcowitz is the author of seven books of poetry and one novel. Her newest collection, The Politics of Snow, contains the poem "Pacific Shadows," which she wrote while visiting Newport in 1999. The collection contains poetic conjecture on subjects ranging from the Great Cosmic Yawn to Andalusia, from Josef Mengele to Joe DiMaggio, from Warsaw to Brooklyn. Resisting the current tide of literary obfuscation, her poetry is decidedly comprehendable and accessible.