Barbara Lightner is a 73-year old shameless agitator, retired. She grew up in rural Tennessee among sharecroppers and cotton magnates, hard scrabble farmers and one aristocrat. Writing poetry in law school became her escape from the intolerable burden of injustice by law. Her poetry has appeared in Verse Wisconsin, Poesia, the Table Rock Review, New Verse News, Occupy Poetry, and the anthologies Letters to the World and So You Want to be a Memoirist. Several of her poems will be set to music by composer Larry Alan Smith.