Poetry and Jeannette Barnes

The poetry of Jeannette Barnes reflects the heart of the author. Laughter, love, deep insight and magical word play. Now this multiple literary prize and award winner shares her work with fellow horse lovers.

Jeannette Barnes - Poems on this Site

Jeannette - JB to our Group, IberianHorse-Worldwide - has, with her innate southern charm and generosity, allowed us to publish some of her works here.
I am coding and uploading, and adding links to each poem as I go. Any errors in spelling and metre are mine and mine alone.


The Turning	My Mother’s Turkish Lilacs are Cut Down	To The Hills	For Jakie


Instruction To The Colts In Summer	Battle-Piece	Dysplasia	What I Will Give You


Mare	To The Garter Snake	Turtle	In Tennessee Some Morning Early Spring

The Poetry of Jeannette Barnes

Winner of a Pushcart Prize, the Nebraska Award in Poetry, the Evelyn Bridges Prize, the Virginia Poetry Society's Edgar Allan Poe Award, the Alabama Prize in Poetry,
placed in the Scottish Open Poetry Competition,
finalist or prizewinner in the Nimrod/Hardiman Poetry Prize, the Guy Owen Poetry Prize, and the Joy Bale Boone Award, and the Ruth Stone Prize in Poetry.

Jeannette Barnes - Poetry elsewhere

Her work has appeared

IN: Pushcart XXVI, Southern Poetry Review, Shenandoah, Nebraska Review, Florida Review, Hunger Mountain, Poets
ON: Poet Lore, Yankee, Nimrod International, Leviathan, Alligator Juniper, Kalliope, Greensboro Review, Wind, Blue Unicorn, The Panhandler, Cumberland Poetry Review, Crucible, Snowline, White Pelican Review, Potomac Review, and many other literary magazines.

Once a stringer and professional feature writer, she has over 50 articles in newspapers and magazines. Her work is often reprinted in Michael Meyer's textbook Poetry: An Introduction, Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001-, and with the same editor's Bedford Introduction to Literature, same house, 2004-.

Work in anthologies includes The Year's Best Poetry, Climate Controlled, Times of Sorrow, Times of Grace, Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry.

Several of her poems are available in the databases PoemFinder and VerseDaily, the online magazine Diagram, and so on.

Life with the Poet

She is perhaps most proud to note that her two grown sons, a doctor of chemical engineering who seeks his own path with his own firm, and a military historian/archivist for a Florida museum, often seek the pleasure of her company.

Her other vices are history, archaeology, laughter, constructive debate, and good wine.

A lifelong amateur rider, formerly a groom and barn manager for the late classical master Dr. Rudolf Vlatten (O) and an avid student of the late Col. Benjamin D. Betts, U.S. Cavalry, she delights in listening to, working with, schooling around, learning from, and daily putting hands on the Andalusian and Lipizzan horses she enjoys and admires, heart and soul.

About Jeannette Barnes

Jeannette Barnes (b. Connecticut, USA, April 11, 1956) grew up in farflung places including Virginia, the British West Indies, and Black Forest, Colorado.

Educated at Colorado College and Phillips University
chosen to serve as a master class working scholar to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference at Middlebury College, Vermont, 1975
B.A. in English from the University of West Florida, 1978
Master of Library Information Studies, University of Alabama, 2002
working scholar in a master class at the Westchester Poetry Festival, Pennsylvania, 2006.

Formerly a department head and academic reference librarian in the Auburn University system; now proudly serving as the Patient (very patient) Medical Reference Librarian for the Veteran's Administration hospital in Alexandria, Louisiana.

As part of Poets in the Schools, she has taught creative writing to people of all ages in Colorado, Oklahoma, California, Arizona, and Florida.

For four years on Okinawa, Barnes taught English as a Second Language.
Her friends call her The Resourceress.

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