Dara Barrois/Dixon has been making poems since before she could read. She drew pictures of poems before she could write properly with our conventional alphabet in conventional ways. Once she could read and write she wrote poems in imitation of what she could read and she self-published these by putting them in small jars with tight lids and launching them off into the currents of the Mississippi River whose banks bordered the little farm on which she was raisedby her maternal grandparents Euphrazie Zeolide Bayhi Becnel Barrois and Gerard Hippolyte Barrois about 15 miles south of New Orleans, Louisiana. Her early public experiences with poetry were all accidental,coincidental, random and arbitrary, ambiguous and unmethodical. Some of the writers and writing she read who were influential in one wayor another include fairy tales and song lyrics, church songs and catechisms, geography textbooks and William Shakespeare’s sonnets and popular plays, Edgar Allan Poe, Willa Cather, Jean Toomer, Kate Chopin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Michael Faraday’s CHEMICAL HISTORY OF A CANDLE are examples of various eye-opening reading experiences. Her formal education included 13 years of Catholic schools, a few years at two public colleges, one in Louisiana for 3 years, one in Virginia for one, and one in Ohio for two. She’s mostly made herliving teaching reading and writing, once for one year for 7th,8th, 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th grades in Virginia, and then at various colleges and universities in various kinds of writing programs across the United States. Her first book, BLOOD, HOOK & EYE, a runner-up for the 1977 Yale Younger Poets prize, was published by the University of Texas Press because the Yale’s judge, Stanley Kunitz, sent it to the University of Texas Press. Her other books are published by Wave Books, Conduit Books, Verse Press, and Carnegie-Mellon. Her personal favorites are BLOOD, HOOK & EYE, VOYAGES IN ENGLISH, HAT ON A POND, REVERSE RAPTURE, YOU GOOD THING and TOLSTOY KILLED ANNA KARENINA, and EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE MYSTICAL EXPERIENCES FOR ASTRONAUTS. Writing about her poems in THE BROOKLYN RAIL, Bianca Stone says “The poems in Tolstoy Killed wrench the reader out of the destructive delusion of imposed narrative---ones imposed upon us by others, and ones we impose upon ourselves. Rob McCllennan writes “Barrois/Dixon writes with a remarkable clarity of lyric and emotional purpose, utilizing the lyric as a means through which to examine and re-examine observation and critical thought, writing out the humanity of our concerns and hopes, and the possibilities within. Her chapbooks have been published by Press Brake, Scram Press, Incessant Pipe, The Song Cave and Paragraphs. Lannan Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, Massachusetts Cultural Council and National Endowment for the Arts have all supported her work with generous grants of money and time. She’s served as a visiting poet across the United States, in particular as the Richard Hugo Chair at the University of Montana, and as the Louis Rubin Writer-in-Residence at Hollin University in Roanoke, Virginia. Her poems have been awarded the American Poetry Review’s Shestack Prize ,The American Poetry Center’s book of the year award for REVERSE RAPTURE and a BELIEVER’S reader’s choice selection for YOU GOOD THING. She founded and edits factory hollow press and lives in western Massachusetts.
