Biography

Barbara Rose Brooker is a seventy-three year old native San Franciscan. She has an MA in creative writing. She regularly teaches writing seminars at SFSU Extension and at private seminars to help men and women over sixty to find their creativity and write their stories. For years she wrote Suddenly Sixty, a weekly column for the Marina Times. Her fiction has been published by Morrow and other presses. Her newest novel, The Viagra Diaries, is about love, sex, and aging after sixty.

Brooker, who had published fiction with other publishing firms, had a hard time marketing this novel. The publishers said no one wanted to read about sixty-, and especially seventy-year-old people. A year later, she sold the novel, but afterwards was asked to make the seventy-year old protagonist younger. When she wouldn’t, the mainstream publisher shelved the book.

But Brooker was determined to get her story out there published. “Never sell out,” she says. “Stay on your yellow brick path.” She is excited and amazed by the reception her novel is receiving. Currently there is a film option and she is working on a screenplay and other projects.

Brooker is also performing her first one-woman show, Two To Tango: Monologues from The Viagra Diaries, about dating sex and love after sixty, at the San Francisco Commonwealth Club, October 19, 2009. She hopes to take Two To Tangoaround the country. Brooker believes that any age is a wonderful time to add new dimensions to one life.

“How we age is who we are. Age is not about a number. It is about living life to the fullest, asking new questions and always forming new goals,” Brooker says.

Brooker is booked for readings at Book Passage in Corte Madera and Book Soup in Los Angeles. She is also booked for personal appearances on the Today Show where she will be interviewed by Kathi Lee Gifford, the Leeza Gibbons show, the Susan Sikaro Show, Christopher Springman,  KRON TV-4 and other national television shows. She has already appeared on Better Sex Radio hosted by Crystal Bougon.

Brooker will be speaking at the national Learning Annex fest in San Francisco, about Age and Creativity and is forming The Dream Production Company, a nonprofit for women over sixty to tell their stories and get published.

“I’m 70 and I love it. To live to sixty and beyond is a celebration of life. Age has no boundaries and to hide your age is to hide yourself,” says Brooker.