About the Author
Barbara Milton
Barbara Milton was born in St. Louis, Missouri, spent summers in Northern Minnesota and now divides her time between New York and Connecticut. She received her BA from Manhattanville College, a Masters in Education from Harvard, and a Masters in Enviromental Management from Yale. She has been an Avon Lady, an Avis-Rent-A-Car agent, a teacher, and the Director of an Audubon Coastal Center.
As a writer she has had three stories and an interview published in The Paris Review. Her stories have won the Pushcart Prize and appeared on their list of Masters of The Short Story. Her collection of short stories, A Small Cartoon, was published by the Word Beat Press and won five stars from Goodreads, the world’s largest site for readers and book recommendations. She also won First Prize in the Duotrope Winning Writer’s Short Story Contest.
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Barbara's favorites authors include; Grace Paley, Alice Munro, Zadie Smith, Alice Mattison, Emma Straub,
Rachel Kushner, and Toni Morrison. Her favorite books are EMMA, and The Great Gatsby.
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A note from the Barbara, about her favorite authors:
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As to Alice Munro: I first came across the name of Alice Munro fifty years ago in a little town in Northern Minnesota, not far from where Munro grew up in Canada. Right next to the train station was a library and because I had been dropped off early I went in there to wait. On the table lay a literary magazine with a Munro story in it. I had never heard of Munro before, but the story was so powerful, so sparse and elegant, that I was sure that someday, someone besides me (like the whole world) would hear of her soon.
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Emma Straub was my student at a small private school that was founded in NYC to provide private school education to children of all ethnic and financial groups. The school itself and the friendships Emma made there, form a lot of the plot and feeling of her novel, Moderns Lovers.
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Alice Mattison, who founded the Anderson Street Workshop, was the most outspoken, and possibly helpful critic of my education as a writer. The New Yorker loved her and for years published her amazing short stories, in which characters spoke so frankly and down-to-earthly that you had to smile at Mattison's total lack of any sort of literary pretensions.
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Grace Paley; Alice may have learned her un-literary way of speaking from the amazing Grace, who practiced her art of conversation on the stoops of brownstones in Brooklyn, NY.​​​