Barden, Louise Cary: - Louise Cary Barden, a 2023 New Women's Voices semi-finalist, won the Lois Cranston Prize (Calyx Journal), Oregon Poetry Association award, the Harperprints chapbook competition, and others. Her poems recently appeared in such journals as Timberline, humana obscura, Willawaw and Cathexis Northwest. Her writing is imbued with imagery of the natural world as narrated by a self-avowed tree-hugger whose career indecisiveness has taken her from teaching college English to advertising and editorial copywriting and marketing management. Nature stayed at the center of Barden's life from her childhood on Boston's South Shore and education at Hendrix College, U. Arkansas (B.A. English), and U. Maine (M.A. English) through residences from Arizona and Wyoming to Maine and Tennessee. Barden and her husband settled in North Carolina for 40 years before retiring to Oregon, where she is still trying to learn to love the rain.