Crooker, Barbara (Poti)
Born: November 21, 1945, in Cold Spring, New York
Vocations: Poet, Public Speaker, Teacher, Columnist, Reviewer
Geographic Connection to Pennsylvania: Fogelsville, Lehigh County; Beaver Falls, Beaver County

Keywords: Autism; Breast Cancer; Diane Wakowski; Elmira College; Fogelsville; Geneva College; Pennsylvania Center for the Book Poetry in Public Places Poster Competition; Rutgers University; Stillbirth; Virginia Center for the Arts; Greatest Hits; 1980-2002; W.B. Yeats Society of New York Award; The Writer’s Almanac

Abstract: Barbara Crooker was born in Cold Spring, New York, in 1945, but currently resides in Fogelsville, Pennsylvania. She began writing poetry in the late 1970s. Her poetry, for which she has won many awards, incorporates themes of nature, home, family, love, loss, and disability. Her poems have been published in anthologies and magazines, as well as compiled in several chapbooks and books including The Lost Children, Ordinary Life, and Greatest Hits, 1980-2002. Crooker continues to write, to read her poetry, to teach workshops, and to speak about the venues available for publishing poetry.

Biography:

Barbara Crooker, a poet from Fogelsville, Pennsylvania, was born Barbara Poti in 1945 in Cold Spring, New York. As a child, Crooker was an enthusiastic reader and enjoyed writing and illustrating stories in notebooks. In high school, she was writer and editor for her school’s newspaper. She received a bachelor’s degree in English from Rutgers University in New Jersey, and then went on to complete her post-graduate studies at Elmira College in New York. She began writing poetry in the 1970s following the stillbirth of her first daughter and a divorce from her husband.

Crooker was first inspired by poet Diane Wakowski. Crooker discovered Wakowski’s poetry in The Eagle, a publication by Mansfield State College (now Mansfield University) in northern Pennsylvania. Crooker claims that Wakowski’s poetry influenced much of her early work. At this time, Crooker developed her style of observing literary techniques in other pieces and incorporating them into her own work.

Early in her career, Crooker wrote about family, birth, love, and loss, drawing on the hardship, joy, and bereavement she experienced as a mother. Her most widely reprinted poem, “The Lost Children,” was the first poem she published. It was included in The Poetry Review, a journal for the Poetry Society of America. It appeared again in three anthologies on parenting, two online journals, six magazines, and several books on loss. Crooker believes this poem was so popular because it provided healing power for other parents who shared similar emotions and experiences.

Crooker then moved to Corning, New York, where she met and married her second and current husband, Richard Crooker. Stacey, her second daughter, was also born in Corning. Her children continued to inspire her poetry, but she began incorporating elements of home life, nature, and politics as well.

Crooker and her family then moved to Fogelsville, Pennsylvania. By this time she and Richard had another daughter, Rebecca, and a son, David. Her children again became the main characters in her poems. These poems were later collected in Ordinary Life. Much of the poetry in this collection focuses on Crooker’s son, David, who was diagnosed with autism when he was about two years old. The poems David inspired reflects on emotional issues involved with raising a disabled child and worrying about his future. Many of these poems have been reprinted in disability and parenting journals.

Although her main undertaking is poetry, Crooker has also written an article for Publishing Tip Quarterly, “Getting Poetry Published in Publications and Anthologies.” She has worked for The Pedestal Magazine as a reviewer of Charles Fishman’s collection of poetry, Country of Memory. And she has taught poetry workshops at the St. David’s Unitus Conference at Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. Since 1990, Crooker has held ten residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Crooker has written more than 1200 poems in her career. Over 700 of them have been published in magazines and journals, such as Yankee, The Christian Science Monitor, Smartish Pace, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Nimrod, The Denver Quarterly, The Cream City Review, Poetry International, The Christian Century, America, The Pennsylvania Review, Poet Lore, and Highlights for Children. They have also been reprinted in nearly a dozen anthologies. Over the years Crooker has become nationally recognized; Garrison Keillor has even read seven of her poems on The Writer’s Almanac, a program on National Public Radio. She is also known internationally, with her work translated into both German and Korean, as well as appearing in several journals in England, Ireland, Italy, France, and New Zealand.

In addition to being published in many magazines and journals, Crooker has published several books and chapbooks, which are self-published works or work published by a boutique printer. Her most popular work includes The Lost Children (1989), Obbligato (1992), In the Late Summer Garden (1998), Ordinary Life (2001), and Greatest Hits, 1980-2002 (2003). A number of her works have won awards. Ordinary Life won the ByLine Chapbook competition in 2001, and Impressionism won the Grayson Books Chapbook competition in 2004. Radiance, due out in July 2005, won the Word Press First Book competition.

Crooker herself has been the recipient of many other awards. She received the 2004 W.B. Yeats Society of New York Award, the 2004 Pennsylvania Center for the Book Public Poetry Project, the 2003 Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, the 2003 "April Is the Cruelest Month" Award from Poets & Writers, the 2000 New Millenium Writing’s Y2K competition, the 1997 Karamu Poetry Award, three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, and a prize from the National Education Association. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize seventeen times and was a nominee for the 1997 Grammy Awards for her part in the audio version of the popular anthology, Grow Old Along With Me—The Best is Yet to Be.

Crooker continues to write about love in long-term relationships, loss (dealing with both the death of her first child and a friend’s losing battle with breast cancer), the hardships and accomplishments of disability (her son persevered through his autism and graduated from high school), the transience of time, and art. Crooker frequently reads her poetry and gives lectures to the public. She still resides in Fogelsville, Pennsylvania, in Lehigh County.

Works:

Books

Chapbooks

Sources:

For More Information:

This biography was prepared by Laura Leimbach, Spring 2005.