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Barbara Schmitz

Barbara Schmitz is a retired professor who taught English at Northeast College in Norfolk, Nebraska. She taught literature and writing for thirty years, coordinated the Visiting Writers series, and was an editor for Elkhorn Review. Barbara published journals in the Prairie Schooner, Laurel Review, Nebraska Review, South Dakota Review, River Styx, Kansas Quarterly, Iconoclast, Poetry Motel, several anthologies, Nebraska Presence, Times of Sorrow, and Times of Grace. She was also a former writer in Residence at the Mabel Dodge Luchan House where she won a Nebraska Arts Council Grant in 1997. Another one of Schmitz's achievements is being apart of the Caravan of the Beautiful located in Sarasota, Florida where she teaches writing to spiritual seekers.

Works

Barbara Schmitz has a collection of works that she has created amongst her time in literature. She wrote Making Tracks, the Lives of the Saints which was number eight on main-traveled road's list in 1996. How to get out of the body was one of her most famous poems which helped her receive the Nebraska Book Poetry Award in 2005. The Upside Down Heart was an intense narrative poem about the her pilgrimage to Israel. Her work How Much our Dancing has Improved was also a winner of the Book Poetry Award in 2005. The most recent works of Schmitz's are What Bob Says, Path of Lighting: A seekers Jagged Journey, and Always the Detail.

Critical Reception

Schmitz's Always the Detail received praise from Michael Dennis Browne he said, "Barbara moves with ease among the many elements, her emotional directness pleases, her honestly reaches us, her sometimes even ecstatic casualness surprise. Natalie Goldberg the writer of Writing Down the Bones comments of Schmitz's Path of Lightning: A seekers Jagged Journey saying "Schmitz endeavors to understand the mystery and beauty of being alive." Retired professor of poetry David Lee from the University of Utah comments of Schmitz's work of How to Get Out of the Body saying the poem is "tough, seasoned, well-grounded, and Schmitz has earned her authority by grounding matter and craft."