About Dr. Mossberg

Professor Mossberg teaches, preaches and writes about the power of language to engage our hunger and develop our capacity to matter utterly to our world. She is dedicated to humanities leadership invoking artistic expression in civic life. She regularly features Emily Dickinson, John Muir and others in lectures, dramatic performances, and critical scholarly studies as exemplars to encourage vibrant life and heroic spirit, resilience, “courage and conscience.” Professor Mossberg’s first book, Emily Dickinson: When A Writer Is A Daughter, was Choice Outstanding Academic Book of the Year; work in progress is immodestly but earnestly conceived as “The Power of Nobody to Change the World—the unlikely role of poetry in war and peace, civil and human rights, and environmental policy.” Her work as a scholar reaches beyond traditional academic boundaries to humanities advocacy in the public realm, so that as she publishes academic and professional studies and serves on boards, she also broadcasts weekly on AM radio, writes cultural criticism for newspapers and Huffington Post, performs as dramatist and dramaturg, gives public lectures in parks and theaters, teaches sonnets in the schools, and has poetry readings and FlashMob poetry events on YouTube. The connective tissue for her endeavors is a commitment to advocate what is at stake for humanity and earth itself in how we express and see our world.

Professor Mossberg, full-time Professor of Practice for the Clark Honors College, is President Emerita of Goddard College; City Poet Emerita (City of Pacific Grove, CA); former College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Dean and Director and Professor, Integrated Studies, California State University; affiliated faculty for Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Ethical and Creative Leadership at Union Institute & University, and M.A. in Engaged Humanities, Pacific Graduate Institute; Visiting Scholar, Department of Biochemistry at UCLA; and host of an on-going weekly hour radio show (The Poetry Slow Down, radiomonterey.com, podcast BarbaraMossberg.com, twitter @barbaramossberg). Dr. Mossberg’s humanities scholarship has been supported and recognized by National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, University of Oregon (Jane Grant Award), California State University, Mellon Foundation, Danforth Foundation, Abbie M. Copps, Fulbright (twice recipient of the Senior Fulbright Distinguished Lectureship) and others. Her work on Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and Gertrude Stein is featured in Mary Helen Burnham’s documentary film “A Daughter’s Art.”

Dr. Mossberg has been an activist educational leader in national, international, federal, state, and institutional roles, including U.S. Scholar in Residence for the U.S. State Department, Senior Fellow for the American Council on Education, Poet in Residence for the Lilly Conference on College and University Teaching, and speaker statewide for the Oregon Commission on the Humanities. In her federal appointment, as U.S. Scholar in Residence for USIA, and in several senior Fulbright awards, she has lectured in over twenty countries and consulted with cultural leaders from around the world. In the U.S., she is a featured speaker for fundraisers and professional conferences ranging from Phi Beta Kappa to Western Respiratory Medicine to the International Leadership Association, as well as schools of law, medicine, education, and leadership, and in venues from the National Cathedral Preacher’s Chapel to Yosemite National Park where she gives annual public lectures on “purple prose strategies to save the world” at the Sierra Club LeConte Memorial Lodge.

Over the past forty years, Dr. Mossberg has published poetry and literary and interdisciplinary cultural studies on ecology and the human spirit, resilience and sustainability in the natural world, ranging from the role of classical writers in society to chaos theory as a transdisciplinary interpretive tool of leadership and expressive arts, from Folio in the 70s to the recent Emily Dickinson Journal (Johns Hopkins University Press) and Cider Press Review. Recent publications concern deep ecology poetry, textual exegesis, transformational leadership based on emergent science and epic wisdom, and poetry’s insight into chaos for leadership studies. One research project, at University of Texas’ Ransom Center, studies the arc of creativity in poets from childhood to “three feet in the afternoon”--so-called old age. Her scholarly work fuses insights from emergent science, ancient wisdom, classics, and dramatic and epic arts, to develop leadership and teaching as a practice and devotion of encouragement of the heroic spirit within each person. Advocating classics education, she continues to publish, lecture, and consult widely in the field of transformational leadership. On-going work includes a study of John Muir’s cultural leadership as a writer, a leader’s reader, and a drama musical on the role of language arts for civic values focused on trees, “a tree-mendous tribute.”

© Barbara Mossberg 2026