Barbara Louise grew up by Minnehaha Creek, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she learned the arts of swimming, dance, haiku, and thrift shopping. 

She studied Japanese, Old Norse, and dance at Stanford, where she published Haiku in English. In Ireland for a year, she studied French and Irish literature at Trinity College, Dublin. 

Traveling around the world for two years, she stopped for a summer on Lake Como and six months in Rome. She lived another summer on the Greek island of Symi, and a year in a cabin in Woodstock, NY, where she performed as “Psyche.”

 In Manhattan for ten years, she taught at City College, Queens College, Lehman College, and the Center for Worker Education, while earning her M.A. at City College and PhD at the Graduate Center of CUNY. She has been married twice, for a total of twenty years (coincidentally, the same number of years she has been in therapy).

 She was a runner up, finalist or semi-finalist for 38 poetry book contests—publishing two chapbooks, a full-length book, and a broadside along the way—before winning the Gival Press Poetry Award for The Origin of the Milky Way.

 An Associate Professor at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY, she lives in Saratoga Springs.  She spends her spare time chasing construction vehicles, collecting rocks, and reading up on cars and snakes with her son Izaak, now 6. They keep a long-necked dinosaur named Lucky in their back yard.