Jan Barry

Jan Barry is a poet, author, educator, life-long student, veteran activist and journalist based in New Jersey. Born Jan Barry Crumb on Jan. 26, 1943 in Ithaca, NY, he grew up in a rural village in the Finger Lakes where poets and writers were few and far between. As a kid he wanted a pen name like Mark Twain, but couldn't come up with anything memorable enough to remember. So hence, Jan Barry. After graduating from Interlaken Central School, he attended the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University, but dropped out to join the Army and see the world. Appointed to the U.S. Military Academy after a stint in Vietnam, he resigned from West Point to become a writer and peace activist.

A co-founder of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, his poems on the war appeared in diverse publications, from the Chicago Tribune and New York Times to A People and A Nation: A History of the United States. His poetry first appeared in Winning Hearts and Minds: War Poems by Vietnam Veterans, published by 1st Casualty Press, founded by Jan Barry and fellow veterans Larry Rottmann and Basil T. Paquet. With W.D. Ehrhart, he compiled a sequel, Demilitarized Zones: Veterans After Vietnam. Marshaling writers and artists confronting the threat of nuclear war, he also edited Peace Is Our Profession: Poems and Passages of War Protest.

Three decades after dropping out of school to become a teenage soldier, he graduated from Ramapo College of New Jersey with a degree in political science, much of it studied first-hand in Vietnamese affairs, citizen exchange liaisons in the Soviet Union, and close encounters with every level of government in America. Profiled in Choosing Sides: I Remember Vietnam (Cronkite Productions, 1998), aired on The History Channel, he has presented poetry readings and observations on the tangled web of historic and current events at numerous colleges, high schools, elementary schools and community forums.

Facing the prospect of being a card-carrying senior citizen without having expounded on the meaning of life, he's the author of A Citizen's Guide to Grassroots Campaigns, Earth Songs: New & Selected Poems, Life After War & Other Poems, and commentaries posted on Internet web sites.

In a journalism career that began with a boyhood newspaper route and included a stint doing research for CBS News radio and televison reports and four decades of writing for weeklies, dailies and national news publications, he has shared newshound tips at journalists' workshops and in teaching journalism courses. He is a recipient of several journalism awards, mainly for persistence, including a Community Service Award from the Society of the Silurians, the oldest press club in the United States. He was a member of an investigative project team at The Record (Bergen Co. NJ) that received a Grantham Prize for Excellence in Reporting on the Environment; the IRE Medal, the Investigative Reporters and Editors' top award; the Society of Professional Journalists' Sigma Delta Chi Award for investigative reporting; and the New Jersey Press Association's public service award.

Everything We Had: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by 33 American Soldiers Who Fought It (Random House, 1981)

Home from the War: Learning from Vietnam Veterans (Other Press, 2005)

Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans' Movement (Crown, 2001)

The Legacy: The Vietnam War in the American Imagination (Beacon Press, 1990)

The New Winter Soldiers: GI and Veteran Dissent During the Vietnam Era (Rutgers University Press, 1996)

No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971)

The Turning: A History of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (New York University Press, 1999)

The War Within: America's Battle over Vietnam (University of California Press, 1994)

Winter Soldiers: An Oral History of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (Twayne, 1997).