Welcome to Phyllis Barber's website (and, by the way, the above quote is in response to How I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir, which was cited in 2012 by TheBrowser.com as one of the top five books written about Las Vegas).

Phyllis Barber, a native of Nevada and now a resident of Denver, Colorado, writes about the West, the desert, the Mormons who played a significant role in settling the West and creating the person she's become, and about matters of the spirit with its familiar and unfamiliar reaches. She's dedicated to a face-to-face writing style inspired by her commitment to being honestly alive, by accepting the reality of "what is," and by speaking her truth as she understands it. A risk-taking writer, she writes frankly and unblinkingly about the jagged, unpredictable edges of things.

For over thirty five years, she's been writing award-winning stories, articles, essays, and books, in addition to  being the mother of four sons, teaching fiction and creative nonfiction in the MFA in Writing Program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts (from which she recently retired), riding her bicycle 1,000 miles across the Midwest, traveling the world, reading across a wide spectrum of books, serving as a community volunteer, playing the piano professionally, and accompanying a diverse variety of musicians. In 2005, she was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame.

Her latest book, Raw Edges: A Memoir, was released by the University of Nevada Press in March of 2010, and was listed as one of the Outstanding University Press Books of 2010 by Foreword Reviews' print magazine. Her hope is that the book will be useful to others who've traveled the sometimes difficult path through marriage, divorce, and coming to terms with one's unexpected self. The book is now available in n paperback and on Amazon kindle.

She's recently completed a collection of personal essays, tentatively titled Dancing With the Sacred, about her experiences among shamans in Peru and Ecuador, Tibetan Buddhist monks in Lhasa and Sikkim in North India, Baptist congregations in Arkansas and South Carolina; about singing praises at mega-churches and dancing in the tents of Bedouins in Jordan; about participating in ceremony with goddess worshipers in the Yucatan, and about canning chili con carne at an LDS (Mormon) welfare cannery in Colorado.

From this collection, "Sweetgrass," which appeared in upstreet five, has been cited as "notable" in The Best American Essays 2010.  "The Knife Handler," published in AGNI 71, has been cited as "notable" in The Best American Essays 2011 and also in The Best American Travel Writing 2011. "At the Cannery," which appeared in Dialogue (Summer, 2009), has won the Best of Dialogue Prize for 2009 in the essay category.

As for her latest writing project, it's in the hopper, better left unnamed and unidentified, but soon to be unveiled. The work is pointed in a totally new direction.

Reviews of her books can be found in the "Books" section.