Craig Barnes
grew up under the cottonwoods of eastern Colorado in a world driven by hard work, redeemed by grand champions and County Fair, or by horse races and baseball in the wheat fields, or by the gentle wisdom of a spinster teacher in a three-room country school. When, suddenly, in 1950, war shuffled the world—and the Barnes family—deck, he was transplanted abruptly to England, Greece and Switzerland, and, in the long run, to Burma, Germany, and Russia. Over the years he has worked as an infantry officer, a laborer, a trial lawyer, a lobbyist, and run for Congress in Denver. He initiated the Sunshine and Sunset concepts in Colorado legislation, was co-counsel on the Denver school integration case and the nation's first comparable worth case for women, has been a newspaper columnist for the Rocky Mountain News and a regular commentator on National Public Radio. In the 1980s he negotiated nuclear issues with leaders in the Academy of Sciences in the Kremlin, in the 1990s he facilitated talks between opposing sides in the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan and thereafter led talks to knit together transboundary water agreements between Kazakhstan, Uzbeckistan, Tajickistan, and Kyrghizstan. His stage play Queen Elizabeth I was produced in Santa Fe in 2001 and his stage play King’s Yellow completed a run in 2003, also in Santa Fe. An analysis of the roles of women as they appear in archeology and myth before the patriarchy, In Search Of The Lost Feminine, Decoding the Myths that Radically Reshaped Civilization, is scheduled for publication in June, 2006. He divides his time between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Marble, Colorado. He has four grown children, ten grandchildren and has been married to his wife Mikaela for 48 years.