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
Barbara Hamby's fourth book of poems, All-Night Lingo Tango (2009), was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her third book of poems, Babel, was chosen by Stephen Dunn to win the 2003 Associated Writing Programs Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and was also published by Pittsburgh.
Her first book, Delirium, 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. Her second book of poems, The Alphabet of Desire, 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.
Hamby received a fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1996. She has also received three fellowships from the Florida Arts Council. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, Ploughshares, Five Points, The Harvard Review, TriQuarterly, Best American Poetry 2000 and 2009, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology 2001. She and her husband, David Kirby, guest-edited an issue of TriQuarterly—128: The UltraTalk Issue. They are also editing an anthology of poetry, Seriously Funny, which will be published by the University of Georgia Press in 2010.
She is Writer-in-Residence in the Creative Writing Program at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida. In Spring 2009 she was a visiting professor at the University of Houston.