Nonfiction

 Essays & Features

My essay about how I started reading John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee novels, and what I see in rereading them now, was published in the Sarasota Herald Tribune as one of their "John D. and Me" series of writers' responses to MacDonald's work, part of Sarasota's celebration of MacDonald's centennial year.
When I interviewed the dazzling Carmen Maria Machado,we talked about the stories in her acclaimed collection Her Body and Other Parties, writers getting paid, haunted malls and motels and other liminal spaces, and much more. "How the Voice Outlives the Body: A Conversation with Carmen Maria Machado" was featured in The Miami Rail's summer 2018 issue.

My essay about the rise, fall, and rise again of Miami's Biscayne Boulevard appeared in FORUM, the Florida Humanities Council magazine, in their series on writers' favorite Florida places. It can  be read in the Forum archives here.

"What Editors Want"

When The Review Review published  "What Editors Want,"  an essay about the submission process,  it went viral. As editor Becky Tuch reported in their weekly newsletter: "Over at The Review Review, things have been more than a little insane. For one thing, Lynne Barrett's article... 'What Editors Want...' spread around the globe and back, earning us coverage in the L.A. Times and The New Yorker. Yeah, we were pretty excited."

Glimmer Train republished "What Editors Want" in their Bulletin of Sept. 1, 2011.

The essay became an updated and expanded print book What Editors Want, published by Rain Chain Press, now in its second printing.


"Angles of Belonging," about having grown up in NJ, being a "Florida writer," and the many ways characters can connect to place, is at Lisa Romeo Writes.

"My Writing Process: A Tango," a personal essay, appeared in TSP, the Story Prize Blog.

"Serenity, Not Now," a personal essay about the weird inappropriateness of Mother's Day Cards when you're the mother of a young child was published in the Sun-Sentinel.

Creative Nonfiction:


My personal essay "First Kiss" will be published in Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment, and Healing, forthcoming from Beacon Press in October 2020.

Edited by Elisa Albo, Richard Blanco, Caridad Moro, and Nikki Moustaki, this anthology will have a forward by Joyce Maynard and an afterward by Anita Hill.
I am honored and delighted that my essay "Scar Tissue," published in Summer 2019 in The Hong Kong Review has been nominated from among essays published in  the magazine in 2019 as for the The Pushcart Prize Best of the Small Presses Series and for Best American Essays. You can see the list of nominees and read short excerpts from the nominated work at the magazine website.
"Window Vent" was published by River Teeth as part of their "Beautiful Things" series.
"Millinery," a memoir piece about my first landlady, storytelling, and hats as essential clues to character, appears in the sewing themed issue of the Southern Women's Review.

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"Hand Clinic," flash memoir, is in Willows Wept Review.

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"Black Velvet" was published in the inaugural issue of The Written Wardrobe. The issue made its debut with a reading at the AWP in Washington DC in 2011, and was published within the Modcloth website. (The issue archive is not online at present.)

"Black Velvet" also became part of a collaborative broadsheet project I did with artist Pip Brandt, mixed media, text, paint, and machine embroidery on velvet. one of a limited edition of four. It was was exhibited in Miami and New York, as part of the SWEAT Artists Broadhseet Collaborative Project, curated by Tom Virgin, and is in the Permanent Collection of the Jaffe Center for the Book at Florida Atlantic University.