Writer, editor, teacher, and translator

Most of my life has been spent in the literary arts, as a writer, editor, translator, teacher, and publisher. As a writer, my work has ranged from fiction and mysteries to journalism and creative nonfiction, particularly memoirs and travel narratives. Some of my best-known works are two mysteries series, one with printer-sleuth Pam Nilsen and one with the translator Cassandra Reilly. These were published under the name Barbara Wilson. I am currently re-releasing them as e-books with Cedar Street Editions. I am also the author of the memoir Blue Windows: A Christian Science Childhood, Incognito Street, and The Pirate Queen. My personal and travel essays have appeared in the Harvard Review, the American Scholar, and the Antioch Review, as well as the New York Times, Slate, and Smithsonian.

As a publisher I participated in the women-in-print movement in the United States and abroad. I co-founded Seal Press and worked with dozens of women writers. Later I turned my efforts to publishing the writing of women from Korea, Bolivia, the Czech Republic, and Scandinavia through the nonprofit Women in Translation. As an editor and teacher I’ve continued to work with writers to help find their voices.

In the last years my writing has often focused on the literature of place, which has included writing about the North Atlantic maritime countries and the north of Scandinavia. The Palace of the Snow Queen tells the story of three winters spent in Lapland. Those travels brought me in contact with the indigenous people of the north, the Sami. Right now I’m greatly drawn to the life and work of the Danish painter and ethnographer, Emilie Demant Hatt, who lived with the mountain Sami in 1907-8. My translation from Danish of With the Lapps in the High Mountains, a travel/ethnographic narrative from 1913, is published by the University of Wisconsin Press with my introduction. I also blog occasionally about Scandinavia at “Lapponia.”