Dr. Barbara Comins, Professor of English, began her professional life as a cellist playing in the New Jersey Symphony, the New York Pops, the New York Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra, and orchestras backing Tony Bennett, Benny Goodman, Henry Mancini, Barry Manilow, Luciano Pavarotti, Doc Severinsen, Frank Sinatra, Ben Vereen, and many others.

Winner of a National Endowment for the Humanities dissertation award, she earned her Ph.D. in English as a fellowship student at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her writing includes pieces in the New York Times, Poetry Calendar, Allegro, the Wallace Stevens Journal, and the Edith Wharton Review. Her essays “‘That Queer Sea’: Elizabeth Bishop and the Sea,” “‘Shuddering Insights’: Elizabeth Bishop and Surprise,” and “‘Then the Theatre…Changed’: Musical Frames for Wallace Stevens” appeared in the anthologies Divisions of the Heart: Elizabeth Bishop and the Art of Memory and Place, “In Worcester Massachusetts”: Essays on Elizabeth Bishop, and Essays on Transgressive Readings: Reading Over the Lines. With the British composer John Marson, she co-wrote the musical Getaway.

At LaGuardia Community College, she teaches freshman composition; creative writing; literature; the college’s capstone liberal arts seminar “Humanism, Science, and Technology,” and the course she created “Cultural Identity in American Literature.”