Phyllis Barber

Phyllis Barber (born Phyllis Nelson on May 11, 1943) is a writer of fiction and non-fiction, often set in the Western United States. She was raised in Boulder City, Nevada and Las Vegas as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). She studied piano at Brigham Young University and moved to Palo Alto, California where her husband studied law at Stanford. There Barber finished her degree in piano at San Jose State College in 1967, and taught and performed piano in California. She studied creative writing at the University of Utah and received an MFA in writing from Vermont College in 1984. She started her writing career by publishing short stories in journals and magazines in the 1980s.

Barber's memoir, ''How I Got Cultured'' (1991) won the creative nonfiction award for Association of Writers & Writing Programs and the award for autobiography from the Association for Mormon Letters. ''How I Got Cultured'' was praised for how Barber describes her complex relationship to the expectations of her religion and the larger "worldly" culture of Las Vegas. Lavina Fielding Anderson described Barber's work as that of an insider describing her faith to outsiders. Barber's novel, ''And the Desert Shall Blossom'' (1989) won first prize in the Utah State Literary competition, and many of her short stories have also won awards. She taught writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts from 1991 to 2010, and has taught other various writing workshops. In 1984, she co-founded the annual writer's conference called Writers at Work in Park City, Utah. Provided by Wikipedia