Anne C. Barnhill

http://www.anneclinardbarnhill.com

Anne C. Barnhill’s work has appeared in a number of literary magazines and anthologies including, most recently, The Antietam Review, and RACING HOME: New Stories from Award-Winning North Carolina Writers. Other publications include the story, Washing Helen’s Hair, from the Grammy-nominated anthology, Grow Old Along With Me, and The Swing, from Generation to Generation.

She has received an Emerging Artist Grant, a Regional Artist Grant and a writer’s residency at the Syvenna Foundation in Texas. She has been selected as a Blumenthal Reader twice and her stories have won several awards, including the Porter Fleming Fiction Award from the Augusta, Georgia Arts Council.

Barnhill publishes nonfiction with a variety of newspapers and magazines including Our State Magazine: Down Home In North Carolina. Her book reviews have appeared in The Notre Dame Review and Main Street Rag as well as the Winston Salem Journal and the Greensboro News and Record.

Her memoir, At Home in the Land of Oz: Autism, My Sister and Me, from Jessica Kingsley Publishers in London, tells the story about what it was like growing up with her autistic sister, Rebecca. Clyde Edgerton says this about the book:

Anne Barnhill, in At Home in the Land of Oz, has written a story that deserves a far brighter and higher billing than the kind of easy, happy, feel-good non-fiction that often tops the best-seller lists. This is because her story deals with those quiet heroics that many families and individuals face while they hide away in pain and misunderstanding. In facing autism full on, Ms. Barnhill has demonstrated how humans can love each other in unspeakable ways, learning languages as well as contours of certain rooms of the heart that some of us are never fortunate enough to know.

And Fred Chappell adds:

. . .A story filled with suspense, humor, empathy, frustration, triumph and heartbreak. Anne Barnhill writes economically, cleanly and frankly and her words will go to the heart of every reader. From her pages I learned that endurance can be the most important component of courage, and I learned in a most entertaining way.

Ms. Barnhill has been the keynote speaker at meetings of Episcopal Church Women in North Carolina and South Carolina. She has also presented programs about memoir writing in Converse College, the Kernersville Moravian Church, the Kernersville Library Book Club and other book clubs; she has taught memoir writing and fiction writing in a variety of places including Guilford College, Greensboro, NC; University of North Carolina at Greensboro; Guilford Technical Community College, the Phoenix Festival at High Point University and the Greensboro YMCA for Seniors.

She has also taught courses in creativity for the faculty and staff at Guilford College and the Center for Creative Leadership, both in Greensboro. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from UNC-Wilmington and is currently at work on a novel set in Tudor England.