Phyllis Barber was born in Nevada and grew up in Boulder City and Las Vegas. She can trace her family's Nevada roots to the 1860s. Trained as a classical pianist, she has served on the Board of Directors for the Utah Symphony. She has also worked as a features writer and teacher. She received a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from Vermont College. Her memoir, How I Got Cultured, won the 1991 Association of Writers & Writing Programs Prize for Creative Nonfiction and the 1993 Award for Best Autobiography from the Association of Mormon Letters. She teaches in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA Writing Program and lives in Denver. She was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame in 2005.

This is an absorbing, often comic, always vivid account of a childhood torn between the demands of a strict Mormon household and the enticements of a thoroughly secular world. . . . In its shape, its tone, its humor, and its verbal authority, this memoir bears comparison to Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood."" -Scott Russell Sanders, author of A Private History of Awe ""The memoir of the remarkable daughter who does splits and cartwheels along her own fine line between fame and damnation."" -Sally S. Eckhoff, Voice Literary Supplement ""Simply the best memoir of Mormon girlhood written in this century."" -The Association for Mormon Letters