Barbara Drake

Barbara Drake’s books and chapbooks of poetry include Driving One Hundred (published in 2009 by Windfall Press), Love at the Egyptian Theatre, What We Say to Strangers, Life in a Gothic Novel, Bees in Wet Weather, and Small Favors. She is also the author of a memoir, Peace at Heart: an Oregon Country Life, from Oregon State University Press, and Writing Poetry, a widely used college textbook, in print since 1983. Her writing appears in numerous literary magazines and anthologies. Peace at Heart was an Oregon Book Award finalist in 1999.

Born in Kansas in 1939, she moved with her parents to Oregon as a small child, a trip which established a pattern for many road trips since. After several relocations, the family settled in Coos Bay on the Southern Oregon coast.After graduating from Coos Bay’s Marshfield High school, she earned her B.A. and M.F.A. degrees from the University of Oregon. In 1962 and 1963 she traveled though Europe on a Lambretta motor scooter and lived on Corfu with her first husband, writer Albert Drake. She later moved to Michigan, worked as a textbook writer for Holt, Rinehart and Winston and freelanced creative writing while raising three children. She eventually returned to teaching, at Michigan State University. After sixteen years in Michigan, Drake returned to Oregon to teach at Linfield College from 1983 until her retirement in 2007. Besides teaching creative writing she has especially enjoyed teaching interdisciplinary courses in environmental literature and book arts, as well as taking students to Europe several times for her “American Expatriate Writers in Europe” literature course. Since 1987, the author and her husband William Beckman have lived on a small Yamhill County farm which was the inspiration for Peace at Heart. Besides writing, she enjoys photography, art, taking walks with her husband and their border collies, and introducing their grandchildren to the country life.

Complete Reading from Mountain Writers Series 2009

Driving One Hundred

In The Eye of One Who Loves You

Perseids

The Dead Man's Foot