Some Figs

Anita Barrows was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1947 and has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1966. Among her awards in poetry have been grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, the Centrum Foundation, and the Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, and publications by The Quarterly Review of Literature and the Riverstone Press.

Her three poetry chapbooks from The Quelquefois Press in Berkeley are housed, among other places, in the University of California Library (Berkeley and Santa Cruz), the British Museum, and libraries in Baghdad and Kabul. She has had four previous books published by Kelsay Books.

Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy have collaborated on four translations of the work from the German of Rainer Maria Rilke, including Letters to a Young Poet, and Barrows’ novel The Language of Birds was published by She Writes Press in 2022. She has also done translations since 1972 of novels, poetry, plays, and nonfiction from French and Italian.

Barrows holds a Ph.D. in psychology and is Institute Professor of Psychology at the Wright Institute, Berkeley. She maintains a private clinical practice in Berkeley and is a mother and grandmother and companion to a household of dogs, cats, and birds.

Paperback: 80 pages
Publisher: Kelsay Books (August 15, 2025)