Boe Barnett

Boe Barnett has worked with diverse groups of students during his teaching career. After he graduated from Northern Arizona University with a B.A. in English in 1999, he taught composition to college freshmen and sophomores while earning an M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he edited the literary journal Permafrost and worked as a tutor in the university’s writing center.

As a graduate student in education at UAF, he student-taught sixth-grade and special education. Following his time at the university and elementary levels, Boe worked with the Literacy Council of Alaska, teaching basic computer literacy to adults. From there, he moved on to work for Head Start, and for two years he worked with underprivileged three-to five-year-olds. Throughout much of this time, he also served as a volunteer instructor for Classroom with a View, a nonprofit organization he helped to found, which provides experiential learning opportunities to homeschoolers, from Spanish immersion in Mexico to backpacking in Alaska.

In 2007, Boe took a break from teaching and turned his attention toward co-founding a beverage manufacturing company in Talkeetna, Alaska. During the next seven years, his writing skills were put to work creating press releases, product descriptions, website content, business planning, and the general correspondence required to run a sizable business. In 2014, Boe resigned his position with the company he founded. He spent the next 18 months writing poetry and travelling with his wife, Jen, and kids throughout the western U.S. in their 1968 Airstream Trade Wind.

Boe spends his free time playing frisbee with his son Parker, watching his daughter, Enli, grow into a confident young woman, and working to complete a poetry manuscript. You can find his work in such journals as Ice-Floe, The Crab Creek Review, Cairn, -Anti, and DIAGRAM.