Barbara Southard grew up in New York City, obtained a PhD in history from the University of Hawaii, and became a professor of history, chairperson of the History Department, and associate dean of Graduate Studies at the Río Piedras Campus of the University of Puerto Rico. She taught the history of the United States and India, with emphasis on social and women’s history. She published a book on Indian history, The Women’s Movement and Colonial Politic in Bengal, 1921-1936, and co-authored with Mayra Rosario Urrutia two textbooks on the history of the United States: Senderos para un Sueño: Geografía e Historia de Estados Unidos and Relaciones Exteriores de Estados Unidos. Both books were selected by the Department of Education of Puerto Rico for use by high school students.

Since retiring, she has been writing short stories and historical novels. Her short stories have been published in Poui: Cave Hill Journal of Creative Writing, Calabash, The Journal of Caribbean Literatures, and Cerebrations. She is a founding member of the online literary journal Moonwired: Literary Review of the Women Writers’ Bilingual Collective of Puerto Rico/Amanecidas: Revista literaria de la colectiva bilingüe de escritoras de Puerto Rico (www.moonwired.org). The memoir she submitted to the annual contest held by Kore press, Uneven Cobblestones: Walking with My Daughter on Her Last Journey was selected as a semi-finalist. In honor of her daughter, who died of a brain tumor, the author established a fund within the Fundación Comunitaria de Puerto Rico to help community organizations working to protect women from domestic violence.

Her collection of short stories set in Puerto Rio, The Pinch of the Crab, explores personal crises embedded in the social conflicts of island life from the 1970s to the present, tensions aggravated by natural and human-created disasters. Differing concepts of gender roles and conflicting political and social ideals are important themes. Most of the stories were written from the point of view of female characters. This collection received an excellent review from a leading literary critic in Puerto Rico, Carmen Dolores Hernández, in the newspaper El Nuevo Día (February 13, 2022).

At present, she is working on publishing a historical novel set in New York, the city where she grew up. Between the Heaves of Storm: The Passion of Elizabeth Tilton explores the Beecher-Tilton scandal of the Reconstruction Era from the point of view of the woman involved. In this new book, once again the author looks at personal crises embedded in social conflicts, but in a different place and a different epoch.