“In this luminous collection, Carla Panciera creates a love letter to her father. These unforgettable stories are by turns touching, tender, and hilarious, and provide a profound look at a lost American way of life.” 
— Holly Robinson, author of Chance Harbor and Folly Cove​​

A famous farmer is a farmer nonetheless. His bull might have been featured in Esquire Magazine, his name might be known by cattle breeders all over the world, but back home, the cows still need to be milked, the corn still has to be harvested, the chores still need to be completed before the end of another long day. And someone has to help him, even as she tries to balance her role on the family farm with her life as a teenager in the 1970’s. Carla Panciera spent years with her father and his famous herd traveling from county fair to county fair, and answering the same question: “Are you Aldo Panciera’s daughter?” But these connected stories are based on the real man and his efforts to make a living at what he loved. Barnflower is about the bond between a father and daughter and their love for the kind of life they shared, a kind of life that is both a critical and a vanishing part of our history. 

Born in Westerly, RI, Carla Panciera was raised on her family’s dairy farm. She graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a BA in English and has a graduate degree in poetry from Boston University where she studied with George Starbuck and Derek Walcott. 

She has published two collections of poetry: One of the Cimalores (Cider Press) and No Day, No Dusk, No Love (Bordighera).  Her poetry has appeared in numerous magazines including Poetry, Painted Bride Quarterly, Nimrod, the Carolina Quarterly, and the Los Angeles Review. Poems have also been nominated for three Pushcart Awards. She received the Aghda Ali Scholarship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and has twice presented at the Student Day of Poetry for the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. 

Her first collection of short stories, Bewildered, received the 2013 Grace Paley Short Fiction Award from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (Pam Houston, judge) and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in the fall of 2014. Her short stories have appeared in the New England Review, the Clackamas Review, Slice, and other magazines. Her short story, “The Kind of People Who Look at Art” was chosen by Junot Díaz as a distinguished story in Best American Short Stories for 2017.

Her newest collection, Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir, was released in the spring of 2023 by Loom Press, Amesbury, MA.

She received a 2022 Individual Artist Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Her blogsite is "I Am a Part of All That I Have Met." A retired high school English teacher, Carla lives with her husband, Dennis Donoghue, and their three daughters in Rowley, MA.