At 97-years-old, Distinguished Professor Emeritus Willis Barnstone hasn't finished writing. His new book, African Bestiary: Tales of Survival was recently published through Black Widow Press.
African Bestiary is a poetic look and plea for all the the animals now endangered or near extinction in Africa. Barnstone, who has traveled and lived in Africa for a number of years stated "I have been working on it (African Bestiary) since my first pencil and ink drawings in Kenya, Zanzibar, etc. for the last 36 years." Delightfully illustrated by Barnstone with full color illustrations on every page, the book is meant to be enjoyed by people of all ages.
Willis Barnstone, born in 1927 in Lewiston, Maine, and educated at Bowdoin, the Sorbonne, SOAS, Columbia and Yale, taught in Greece at the end of the civil war (1949-51), was in Haiti during the deadly rule of Papa Doc (1960), in China during the Cultural Revolution in 1972. and in Buenos Aires during the Dirty War (1975-1976), A Fulbright Professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University (1984-1985). Former O’Connor Professor of Greek at Colgate University (1973), he is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and Spanish at Indiana University. He lives in Oakland, California.
A Guggenheim fellow, he received NEA, NEH, ACLS, W.H. Auden Award of NY Council on the Arts, Midland Authors Award, 4 Book of the Month selections, 4 Pulitzer nominations, 6 Poetry Society of America prizes, including the Emily Dickinson Award, and in 2015 the Fred Cody Life Achievement Award. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Harper’s, New York Review of Books, Paris Review, Poetry, New Yorker, & the Times Literary Supplement among others.
The College of Arts