Barbara Ungar
Current City, State, Country
Birth City, State, Country
Biography
Barbara Ungar is the author of six full-length books of poetry, most recently, After Naming the Animals. Her prior book, Save Our Ship, won the Snyder Prize and was named to Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2019. The Origin of the Milky Way won the Gival Poetry Prize and a Silver Independent Publisher Award. Other books include Charlotte Brontë, You Ruined My Life and Immortal Medusa, which was named to Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2015 and won the Adirondack Center for Writing Poetry Award. She has published poems in Scientific American, Salmagundi, Southern Indiana Review, Rattle, Crazyhorse, Hypertext, Modern Haiku, and many other journals. She has also published three chapbooks of poetry and a monograph, Haiku in English. A professor emerita from The College of Saint Rose, in Albany, NY, she spent several years traveling around the world before earning her MA from City College and PhD from The Graduate Center of CUNY (City University of New York).
What is the relationship between Judaism and/or Jewish culture and your poetry?
I discovered my alter ego, “Kabbalah Barbie,” while writing Immortal Medusa; she returns to introduce After Naming the Animals, which is influenced by kabbalah in its conception and structure. This book imagines Eve as participating in naming the animals, and our present state of environmental destruction as an ongoing self-banishment from the garden.
All of my books contain one or more Jewish-themed poems, often re-envisioning a biblical text from a woman’s perspective, like Job’s nameless wife, or on the shoah, or my lost Hungarian relatives, like “Ode to Ilboya,” from Save Our Ship. While not particularly observant, I had a reform Jewish education. My bat mitzvah was my first experience of public performance: I opened my mouth and a voice came out that I did not know I possessed. That was the first glimmer of my career of teaching and performing poetry.
What I value most about Judaism is its emphasis on learning and questioning, which is central to all my work.
Published Works
After Naming the Animals (The Word Works, 2024)
EDGE (chapbook, Ethel Press, 2020)
Save Our Ship (Ashland Poetry Press, 2019)
Immortal Medusa (The Word Works, 2015)
Charlotte Bronte, You Ruined My Life (The Word Works, 2011)
The Origin of the Milky Way (Gival Press, 2007)
Thrift (Word Tech, 2005)
Sequel (chapbook, Finishing Line Press, 2002)
Neoclassical Barbra (chapbook, Angel Fish Press, 1999)
Literary Criticism
Haiku in English (Stanford Honors Essay in Humanities, 1978)
Author Site
Links to Sample Works
Video Reading
Current Title
Education
Stanford University, BA
City College, CUNY, MA
The Graduate Center, CUNY, PhD