Hundreds of verses into her career as a writer for Hallmark Cards, Barbara Loots remained essentially anonymous. However, her optimistic view of life touched thousands of lives with a broad swath of social communications, from birthdays to holidays to care of the grieving. She is the author of a number of children’s books published by Hallmark, including Fun on the Farm with Numbers, now in the Smithsonian collection of pop-up books.
Her work as a poet has been appearing since the 1960s in magazines such as The Lyric, Blue Unicorn, New Letters, Measure, Cricket, and The Christian Century. Anthologies include The Random House Treasury of Light Verse, The Random House Book of Poetry for Children, The Helicon Nine Reader, The Muse Strikes Back, The Whirlybird Anthology of Kansas City Writers, and Landscapes with Women. Online, her poems can be found at Mezzo Cammin and Light Poetry Magazine. Her chapbooks are The Bride’s Mirror Speaks and Sibyl & Sphinx (with Gail White). Her collection Road Trip was published by Kelsay Books/White Violet Press in 2014.
In the formalist tradition, she writes with admiration for such poets as Robert Frost, Richard Wilbur, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. She resides in Kansas City, Missouri, where she volunteers as a Docent for the renowned Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and worships with the Presbyterians at Second Church. She is married to Bill Dickinson and obeys orders from Bob the Cat.
Paperback: 80 pagesPublisher: Kelsay Books (January 22, 2018)
Award:
AAUW Thorpe Menn Literary Excellence Award Finalist 2019