About
Bio:
Barbara Westwood Diehl is senior editor of The Baltimore Review. Her fiction and poetry appear in a variety of journals, including Fractured Lit, South Florida Poetry Journal, Poetry South, Painted Bride Quarterly, Five South, Allium, Split Rock Review, Blink-Ink, Midway, Switch, Fictive Dream, Potomac Review (Best of the 50), MacGuffin, Gargoyle, Free State Review, Raleigh Review, Bacopa Review, Ghost Parachute, Pithead Chapel, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and New World Writing Quarterly.
Aside from the traditional third-person bio:
I write poems and stories because looking at the world slant feels more tolerable than looking at it head on. And I love puzzling words and punctuation into complete pictures. I hope that people who read my work will consider things in a way they might not have before. Sometimes my work is firmly planted in reality; sometimes it’s fantastical. Sometimes dark and serious, sometimes with a touch of humor. I like to mix it up. Because life is like that, right? Mixed up. I want to rent a room in readers’ heads, at least have some sort of short-term lease. Most of my writing is, in fact, short. Poems, micros, flash fiction, short stories. Small rooms. Sometimes closets.
I have had the pleasure of sharing my work with in-person and Zoom audiences, as well as hosting writing workshops.
And the Editing Hat
As the founding and managing editor for a journal born thirty years ago, I wear many hats. Nonprofit organization paperwork, budgets and fundraising, working with an all-volunteer staff and training interns, reading thousands of submissions, communicating with writers, nominating writers for awards, posting on social media, working with our web guy who is much better at coding than I am, and all the other administrative and editorial tasks required to keep a literary journal chugging along.
I have had the honor of being a speaker and panelist at writing conferences and events, including AWP, the Baltimore Writer’s Conference, the Eastern Shore Writers Conference, and Conversations and Connections.
Above all, I try very hard to publish a journal that will stand the test of time, and I try very hard to treat writers the way I want to be treated. I do this with the help of twenty to thirty incredible staff members.
