Quick Facts
Biography
Barbara Herman Kremen (born 1922) is an American writer whose work consists of fiction, poetry, and literary essays. She was born and raised in New Jersey, and now resides in North Carolina.
Her publications include Out Of, a poetry collection; Tree Trove, a botanical fantasy on trees for children and adults; The Damsel Fly and Other Stories; and essays and poems published inSewanee Review, Pembroke Magazine, Philological Quarterly, and Romance Notes'.
Kremen's style has been described as:
"Crisscrossing of scientific and literary languages, a practice that makes us aware of the multiple and often fractured ways in which we seize other species for our purposes- psychological, aesthetic, folkloric, and scientific.."
— Catherine Gallagher, The Scales of Life in Barbara Kremen's Short Stories
Biography
Kremen received a B.A. from Bryn Mawr College and an M.A. from Harvard University in English. She undertook further studies at the Sorbonne and in the graduate program in French and English literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
During World War II, Kremen joined the WAC and worked as a journalist at Camp Shanks, New York, a staging area for the European Theatre, and then with Army News Service in New York City where she wrote feature articles.After the war she spent three years abroad in France and later in Ascona, Switzerland, where she formed lifelong friendships within a circle of writers, artists and musicians, including: Aline Valangin, Wladimir Vogel, Italo Valenti, and Werner Rings.
Following her return to New York, Kremen worked as a writer and a researcher on folk costume at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and as an English teacher in private high schools in Brooklyn and Cambridge, Massachusetts. While in New York she formed friendships with John Cage, Merce Cunningham, M. C. Richards and David Tudor. She is married to the artist and professor of psychology emeritus at Duke University, Irwin Kremen.