Poet, translator and essayist Tony Barnstone is Professor of English at Whittier College. Born in Middletown, Connecticut, and raised in Bloomington, Indiana, Barnstone lived for years in Greece, Spain, Kenya and China before taking his Masters in English and Creative Writing and Ph.D. in English Literature at U.C. Berkeley.

Here are links to a few places where you can read or hear his work online:

• A sampling of poems from his new project, The World in Pieces: The Pacific War from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima (a book of dramatic monologues set in the Pacific during the Second World War) is posted on his own Web site.
• From the Fishouse has posted a collection of audiopoems and recorded Q&As in its archive.
• His essay, “Manifesto on the Contemporary Sonnet: A Personal Aesthetics,” keynoted The Cortland Review’s special sonnet issue in 2006, which also included his sonnet “The Cave,” in text and RealAudio.
• The Drunken Boat has an interview with Barnstone by Rebecca Seiferle, a selection “Readymades” (experimental poems created by a process he describes as “collage and active misprision... crazed paleontology”), a collection of his translations of Chinese poems (with Chou Ping), and a long series of sonnets (including several 14-line not-quite-sonnets) from his 2005 book Sad Jazz: Sonnets (Sheep Meadow Press).
• His animated avatar’s reading of his poem “Commandments” is one of the videopoems on the Stage Upstairs at Blue’s Cruzio Cafe.
• His essay “Letters from Dead Friends” was published in Robert Sward’s special series on writers’ friendships at Perihelion.
• Exquisite Corpse #8 published “The Log of Christopher Columbus.”

To purchase Barnstone’s books, use these shopping links:

• Laughing Lost in the Mountains: Selected Poems of Wang Wei (translations, with Willis Barnstone & Xu Haixin, University Press of New England, 1991)
  
• Out of the Howling Storm: The New Chinese Poetry (translations, Wesleyan University Press, 1993)
  
• Impure (poems, The Contemporary Poetry Series, University Press of Florida, 1999)
  
• Naked Magic (chapbook of poems, Main Street Rag Press, 2002)
  Available only direct from the publisher (Scroll down their list of chapbooks in alphabetical order by title to find Naked Magic.)
• Sad Jazz: Sonnets (poems, Sheep Meadow Press, 2005)
  
• The Golem of Los Angeles (poems, Red Hen Press, 2007)
  

MORE ABOUT THE IBPC...

General information

Archive of winning poems