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Barney Latimer received a BA in English from Yale University, where he was awarded the Frederick Mortimer Clapp Fellowship in Poetry, and an MA in English from New York University, where he was a Henry M. MacCracken Fellow. He specialized at both universities in the study of poetry, and he has written and taught poetry for over thirty years.​

 

Barney’s love of language and literature derives from the many books his parents read aloud as he was growing up, which transported him from Mark Twain’s Mississippi to the farthest reaches of Oz and Narnia. As a teenager, Barney was inspired by the incantatory rhythm and youthful ennui of “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” to begin writing poetry. He has written, read, studied, and taught poetry ever since. A highlight has been the poetry seminars he taught at the National Alliance for Mental Illness (NAMI) and at day-treatment programs for New Yorkers living with depression, bipolar 2, schizophrenia, and other mental illnesses. He has seen firsthand how cathartic poetry can be, how it can help writers externalize and thereby gain some control over debilitating emotions and states of mind. 

 

Barney credits his skills as an editor to his lifelong immersion in literature—from fiction and creative nonfiction to poetry, drama, and beyond. Reading for Barney is not just an escape but a means of expanding his knowledge of what writing can do, what doors it can open in the mind and imagination, what connections it can make between people from radically different backgrounds. Through his extensive reading, Barney has gained invaluable insight into what makes certain words and phrases cut to the heart, persuade the mind, and capture the imagination. This allows him to empower his clients to discover and deploy their unique voices, to trust that they possess a style all their own and a story worth telling.