Jim Weaver McKown Barnes (born 1933) is a Native American author born near Summerfield, Oklahoma (in Le Flore County) and is of Choctaw and Welsh heritage. He received his BA from Southeastern State College in Durant, OK (now Southeastern Oklahoma State University) in 1964 and his MA (1965) and Ph.D. (1972) from the University of Arkansas. He taught at Truman State University from 1970 to 2003, where he was Professor of Comparative Literature and Writer-in-Residence. After retiring from Truman State, he was Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at Brigham Young University until 2006. On January 15, 2009, Barnes was named Oklahoma poet laureate for 2009-2010.
Barnes is the founding editor of the Chariton Review Press and editor of The Chariton Review. He is also a contributing editor to the Pushcart Prize. He has published over 500 poems in more than 100 journals, as well as numerous translations. He has sat on several National Endowment for the Arts committees and is presently Poetry Editor for the Truman State University Press. Barnes has given readings of his work at many college and university campuses, and his work is widely anthologized.
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Barnes received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in 1978 and the Columbia University Translation Award for his translation of Dagmar Nick's Zeugnis und Zeichen (Summons and Signs) in 1980. In 1989 he was awarded the St. Louis Poetry Center's Stanley Hanks Memorial Poetry Award, and in 1990 he was awarded a Bellagio Residency Fellowship for the purpose of beginning his translations of Dagmar Nick's poetry by the Rockefeller Foundation. He held a second Rockefeller Bellagio Residency Fellowship in 2003. In 1992 Jim was a Distinguished Writer-in-Residence for the University of Maryland Far East Division. In 1993 Barnes received the Oklahoma Book Award for The Sawdust War, and he was awarded a Senior Fulbright Fellowship to Switzerland in 1993-94. In 1998, On Native Ground: Memoirs and Impressions was named a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award in non-fiction and in the poetry category for Paris.
Barnes has been the Featured Poet at the Paris Writers Workshop and at the 13th Franco-Anglais Poetry Translation Festival. In 1995 he was the Munich Translator-in-Residence at Villa Walberta, Germany, and he has held two Carmargo Foundation Fellowships in Cassis, France and the U.S. Representative at the Prague Writer's Festival. In 1998 and in 2000, Jim was awarded Academie Schloß Solitude Fellowships in Stuttgart, Germany and received an American Book Award for On Native Ground. In 2002, he was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award in the Poetry category for On a Wing of the Sun.
Thomas Jefferson University Press.
Chariton Review Press.
New Odyssey Press.
American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series, Vol 23, University of Oklahoma Press.
Critical Studies
A. Robert Lee (ed), The Salt Companion to Jim Barnes, Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishing, 2009.