Barbara is a researcher, lecturer, and author of 24 books and numerous articles on comparative religion, history, mythology, symbolism, mineral lore, the tarot, the I Ching, a collection of original Feminist Fairy Tales, an autobiography, a novel, and two essay collections: Man Made God and Belief and Unbelief. Her Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets has been in print since 1983 and was named Book of the Year by the London Times. Its companion volume is The Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects. She received the Humanist Heroine of the Year award from the American Humanist Association, the Women Making Herstory award from New Jersey NOW, and the Olympia Brown award from the Unitarian Universalist Association. She is listed in that prestigious 1200-page compendium of notable freethinkers, Who’s Who in Hell.
As an artist, she created 78 original paintings for the Barbara Walker Tarot Deck, and 64 more for her I Ching of the Goddesscards, both published with companion books. She was a professional knitwear designer, and her books on knitting patterns are American classics. She invented over a thousand original pattern stitches, more than any other single person known to history. She also invented a new system for charting patterns, developed a color technique that she named Mosaic Knitting, and received an Inspiration award from Vogue Knitting magazine.
A complete list of Barbara’s works can be found here.
She grew up in a Philadelphia suburb and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Pennsylvania. She worked as a newspaper reporter in Washington D.C., before moving to Morristown, New Jersey, where she taught modern dance, along with studying, knitting, designing, painting and writing, in addition to homemaking and motherhood. Her marriage to research chemist Gordon Walker, Ph.D., lasted 64 years, until his death in January 2017. Her son, Alan Walker, currently lives in Massachusetts.
A complete list of Barbara’s works can be found here.
