Biography
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Dedria Humphries Barker is an author, journalist and visual artist. A native of Detroit, Michigan, she is the third of thirteen children born to Andrew John and Mary Jane Humphries. Her father was a Detroit police officer. She attended Detroit Public Schools and Wayne State University. She hold certificates in the literary arts. She ran for public office in 2024.
Dedria is the creator of the Blue People series, a product of the COVID-19 pandemic. She received an East Lansing Arts Council grant for Blue People. The series of 12 colored pencil on paper drawings exploring the theme of mass incarceration were displayed at the East Lansing Public Library, and the Blue Owl coffee shop in East Lansing, and the Urban Cottage Art Show in Lansing, Michigan. Her art has been supported by SOLHOT-60+, a 2024 artist residency partnership between the Michigan State University African and African American Studies Department and the Art School of the Flint Institute of Art. At Solhot-60+, Humphries Barker developed the second iteration of Blue People, Michigan's African Faces.
Humphries Barker is the author of Mother of Orphans: The True and Curious Story of Irish Alice, a Colored Man’s Widow (New York: 2Leaf Press, 2020), a social justice mixed-race family biography.
Her literary work is supported by a National Endowment for the Arts G.R.I.T. award, and the Chris Clarke Fellowship. She is a fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Can Serrat International Artist Residency, Barcelona, Spain, where she was amazed to see young European artists showing their work in progress while the Americans, including her, showed their work in Power Point presentations. That was a soul search moment. She is a member of the Community of Writers, the Rally of Writers and Bear River Writers Conference.
Her critical literary work has appeared in PloughsharesBlog, and The Perch, a Yale University Community Mental Health publication. She writes a monthly column on education and politics in The Lansing City Pulse, a weekly newspaper. Her essays appear in The Beiging of America: Personal Narratives of Mixed-Race Americans, and Black Lives Have Always Mattered. Her fiction appeared in Absolute Visions.
A former staff writer with two Gannett Co., Inc., daily newspapers, she wrote features for The Commercial-News in Danville, Illinois, and news for The Lansing State Journal in Lansing, Michigan. Her career was built on experience with the African American weekly newspaper, The Michigan Chronicle in Detroit, and The New Physician, the American Medical Student Association journal. Her work has also appeared in local, regional and national markets including Salon.com, The New York Times, The Detroit News, The Milwaukee Courier, The Miami Times, Redbook and Good Housekeeping magazines, Utne Reader, the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature, and the Ohio and Michigan historical societies. She writes a monthly column based on public education in the Lansing City Pulse.
Find her at https://www.dedriahumphries.com and on Facebook and Twitter @dedria_hb. And Instagram at dedriahb.
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