Archives West Finding Aid

Phyllis Nelson Barber (1943-) was born in Henderson, Nevada, on May 11, 1943. She was raised in Boulder City and Las Vegas Nevada. Barber attended Brigham Young University from 1961 to 1964, where she studied piano. There, she met and married David H. Barber in 1964; together, they had four sons. Phyllis Barber divorced from David Barber in 1996. She married William “Bill” Traeger in 2000; the couple divorced in 2002 and remarried in 2010, whereupon they settled in Park City, Utah.

After marriage, the Barbers moved to Palo Alto, California, while David Barber pursued a law degree at Stanford. In California, Phyllis Barber continued her studies, receiving a BA in Music from San Jose State in 1967. Barber taught and performed music while living in California; however, she decided that working as a concert pianist was not a viable career. The Barbers subsequently lived in Colorado and Utah, where Phyllis participated in various writing workshops and took creative writing courses at the University of Utah. During this time, she began writing for Utah Holiday magazine in Salt Lake City.

In 1984, Barber received an MFA in writing from Vermont College. The same year, she co-founded the annual conference Writers at Work in Park City, Utah. In addition to publishing novels, short stories, articles, essays, and a book for young readers, Barber served on the faculty of Vermont College, where she led numerous writing workshops and continuing education classes. She has received numerous awards for both teaching and writing. Barber is known for her cycle of memoirs, which began in 1991 with How I got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir. Raised a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Barber’s fiction and nonfiction deal with themes of organized religion and spirituality; her work also engages with the history, environment, and culture of the American West.