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"When a close friend read my third book, Turning to the Sunset, she commented that the title and the section on aging were too sad, too final. I was not surprised, as she has difficulty acknowledging this phase of our lives, but I wanted to address this phase of my life. My poetry file has filled up again and I now want to say that, even though I am aging, I am not quite finished. After all, 'it ain't over till it's over.' Many of the themes of my first three books remain the same, but I have added a new section 'Art and Beauty' because the arts have been a great part of my life. I received my BA in art history, worked for galleries in Santa Fe for over twenty years, and have enriched my life through the years with the contemporary and historic arts in the gallery and museum shows of New York, France, and the Southwest."
Barbara Berkenfield grew up amid the noise and soot of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania during its heyday as a noisy world of belching steel mills and clanging streetcars. Memories of her childhood continue to surface to this day as poems. Arriving in New York after college, she found her niche as a research consultant at a French gallery and met her husband. Eventually John's career took the family to France where they and two young sons came to cherish its beauties and traditions. Returning to their eastern suburban home after seven years, they never felt truly "at home" again until they moved to Santa Fe in 1989. Here Barbara became a free-lance writer, a published poet, worked in art galleries for more than twenty years and continues to be a docent at El Rancho de las Golondrinas in Santa Fe.
