Doctor of Clinical Social Work

Where the record ends,
the story begins.

Scholarship for practitioners. Fiction for a Saturday afternoon. Instructor of Psychopathology at the University of Kentucky, and a novelist of ordinary rooms.

Portrait of Michelle J. Barker
Michelle J. Barker, DSW · LMSW · CSWA

The through line

What I study

I study relationships. Not the people in them, taken one at a time, but the thing that exists between them, which is harder to see and is usually the part that is hurting.

The scholarship asks what it costs when a relationship is left out of the record. The fiction asks what it is like inside one. The method does not change when the room does.

Read the biography