Walk West on Bleecker Street
Roberta Barba

Copyright 1999
International Standard Book Number: 1-929612-04-4
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-068803

Roberta A. Barba, recently retired from a forty year career offering mental health services to persons in need, is a member since 1963 of the Academy of Certified Social Workers and is a Diplomate, Emeritus, in clinical social work. After completing degrees at WVU, U Conn, and NYU with an internship at a mental hygiene clinic at Morris High School in the Bronx, she was on staff at several universities, managed a private practice, and worked in diverse agency settings including psychiatric and medical facilities, youth programs, corrections, hospice, and a shelter for the homeless. Ms. Barba grew to respect the dignity, creativity and right to self-determination of each individual. She learned that people are seldom destroyed by life’s sucker-punches: devastated plans and hopes or handicapping personal quirks; they continue to find and use resources to rebuild, to do the best they can with what they have.

With humor and compassion Ms. Barba yearned to share her belief that life is essentially about loving and helping one another to "keep on keeping on." She wrote several professional articles, contributed a section about Appalachian perspective to a textbook on working with the terminally ill, and published a collection of her short stories, Kids Know, in 1992. She had such fun with it and such enthusiastic response from friends that she created this second collection, Walk West On Bleecker Street.

Ms. Barba returned to West Virginia, where she was born, and lives with her husband of thirty years, Robert Church. She has one son, a research chemist.