Though she recently retired from teaching on a full-time basis, Barber taught in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing Program from 1991 to 2010. Since that time, she has taught for Lighthouse Writers in Denver and conducts small classes in memoir-writing in Park City, Utah, where she now lives. She was a visiting writer at the University of Missouri/Columbia and at Mankato College in Minnesota, and has taught in continuing education programs in Park City, Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, and Rochester, Minnesota. She has led many private workshops and participated in a wide variety of literary panels at the Associated Writers and Writing Conferences, Writers at Work, and at Vermont College of Fine Arts. In 1999, she received the Louise Crowley and Roger Weingarten Award for Excellence in Teaching at Vermont College.

From Barber: "I very much enjoyed the low-residency format at VCFA where I was both a student and a teacher. As a teacher, I could sit in the quiet of my office after returning from the two-week residency in Vermont and  become involved with a student’s writing in an even more intimate way than in a regular academic setting---examining line by line, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, as well as finding the big picture and looking for the long shot. One of my greatest pleasures has been to acquaint myself with other writers' work and help them create the best possible manuscript.

"We all have our own stories to tell in the way we have to tell them, and a good teacher encourages students to follow their own voice, their own vision, rather than the teacher's. I believe there is no right way to tell a story or write a book, and that is the challenge of teaching well. I now take a few individual students when the occasion is right, but I'm enjoying the creative, daydreaming mode of first drafts and raw prose."