Dedria Humphries Barker
About Dedria H. Barker
Dedria A. Humphries Barker is an African American woman writer who writes about mixed-race family issues in mid-west United States. Her family is composed of people of different races, primarily white and black people. She is married and the mother of three adult children.
A native of Detroit, Dedria earned bachelor of arts and master of arts degrees in English from Wayne State University in Detroit. While an undergraduate at Wayne, she pledged Delta Sigma Theta, Inc., a Service Sorority Founded in 1913. She received a certificate in journalism from the Maynard Institute of Journalism Education at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a member of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and studied with MacArthur award recipient, author James McPherson at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.
During college she worked as a seasonal employee with the City of Detroit, and after college began her writing career as a stringer with The Michigan Chronicle in Detroit.
She has held a series of writing, editing staff positions. She was a staff writer with two Gannett Co., Inc. daily newspapers, The Commercial-News in Danville, Illinois, and the Lansing State Journal in Michigan. employed Humphries Barker directed the publications program of The College of Human Medicine at Michigan State University, after which she created, owned and published Take Care Multicultural Health Magazine with editions in Lansing and Detroit. Following that four-year entrepreneurial venture, she joined the writing program adjunct faculty of Lansing Community College (Michigan). The Board of Trustees awarded her with a full-time academic appointment with rank of professor in 2002. During her tenure, she served as lead faculty of the writing program, and lead the successful initiative to require students to complete their mandatory writing course in the first year of college.
Professor Humphries Barker never let her writing career falter. While employed in staff positions, she published in markets such as The Black Collegian, The New Physician, Redbook, and Good Housekeeping magazines, the Journal of the National Technical Association, Salon.com, LiteraryMama.com., and The Detroit News, among others.
Her creative writing has been published in “little magazines” such as Sundry: A Journal of the Arts, and the collection, Absolute Visions: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction (2012). Her historical writing has been published by the historical societies of Michigan and Ohio, and the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature.
The independent, woman of color owned concern, 2Leaf Press published her race-based work in two anthologies, Black Lives Have Always Mattered (2017) and The Beiging of America (2017). Humphries Barker's first book, Mother of Orphans: The True and Curious Story of Irish Alice, a Colored Man's Widow was published by 2Leaf Press in 2020.