Phyllis Barber
AUTHOR

Phyllis Barber

Literature & Fiction
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Phyllis Barber is a writer living in Park City, Utah. She 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 been writing award-winning stories, articles, essays, and books for over thirty-five years, in between being the mother of four sons, teaching creative writing, riding her bicycle, traveling the world, reading a wide spectrum of books, and serving as a community volunteer. Her eighth book and latest memoir, TO THE MOUNTAIN: MEMOIR OF A MORMON SEEKER, is forthcoming from Quest Books in May 2014, and is about her twenty-year hiatus from Mormonism and her travels to participate in a wide variety of spiritual persuasions---shamans in Peru, Tibetan Buddhist monks in North India, megachurches in Denver, and more. Her first memoir, HOW I GOT CULTURED, won the AWP (Associated Writing Programs) Award for Creative Nonfiction in 1991 as well as the 1993 Association for Mormon Letters Award for Best Autobiography. It has been widely anthologized and listed as one of the top five books written about Las Vegas by the Las Vegas Mercury and browser.com. The second memoir, titled RAW EDGES, is an intimate and frank recounting of the dissolution of a marriage---an account written to be useful to others who've traveled the sometimes challenging path through marriage, divorce, and coming to terms with one's self. She's currently finishing up a collection of essays titled Searching for Spirit 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, with goddess worshipers in the Yucatan, and at an LDS (Mormon) welfare cannery in Colorado. Several of these essays have been published by upstreet, Agni Magazine, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, and Sunstone: Mormon Experience, Scholarship, Issues & Art. Phyllis Barber's desire as a writer has always been to write words that touch people's hearts and minds, even as she's appreciated written words that have touched her heart and mind and enriched her life. She believes in wrestling with the challenging issues of being alive and often takes risks by writing frankly, unblinkingly, about the raw edge of things. She's come to believe that writing in a deeply emotional and honest way exposes the connectedness of all human beings.
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