Barbara DeMarco-Barrett

Barbara DeMarco-Barrett

My home town of Altoona, Pennsylvania, feels like a lifetime away from Orange County, California, where I’ve made my life for years now. Along the way, I’ve worn just about every hat imaginable from semiconductor inspector, Avon lady, auto parts runner, baker, and waitress, to restaurant manager, crisis intervention counselor, voiceover actor, copywriter, and publicist. (Though if you ask my grade school self, my proudest early achievement was usually winning the class spelling bee.)

Writing has been the central thread through it all. My first book, Pen on Fire: A Busy Woman’s Guide to Igniting the Writer Within, became a Los Angeles Times bestseller and earned an American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) Outstanding Book Award. More recently, I edited and contributed a story to Palm Springs Noir (Akashic Books). My journey into noir fiction actually started with a short story, “Crazy for You,” originally published in Orange County Noir and later selected for USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series. In November 2023, my short story “Rowboat,” published in Kelp Journal, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Over the years, my short fiction, poetry, essays, and articles have appeared in publications like Coolest American Stories 2022, CrimeReads, LitHub, Dark City Crime & Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Los Angeles Times, Writer’s Digest, Poets & Writers, Cutbank, The Ocotillo Review, Beach Reads, and The Oyez Review, among many others.

Teaching and fostering writing communities are as close to my heart as my own craft. I’m a lecturer at Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts, an adjunct professor of Advanced Creative Writing at Saddleback College Emeritus Institute, an instructor at Gotham Writers Workshop online, and I run two private workshops. In Corona del Mar, I founded the Pen on Fire Writers Salon, and since the summer of 2013, I’ve hosted writers’ retreats out in Palm Springs.

In 1998, I started interviewing authors, agents, and poets on Writers on Writing, which originally aired on KUCI FM and has since grown into a long running podcast. Beyond teaching and broadcasting, I served as the former president of the Orange County chapter of Sisters in Crime, edited The ASJA Monthly from 2002 to 2014, and was honored with ASJA’s Extraordinary Service Award in 2015. I was also deeply honored to receive a Distinguished Instructor Award from UC Irvine and to be named Literary Magnet #1 in Orange Coast Magazine’s "Best of Orange County."