She was raised in Akron, Ohio. She teaches in the English Department at California State University at Northridge
Her work has appeared in Antioch Review, AGNI, Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Kenyon Review, Mid-American Review, Parnassus, POETRY, Pool, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, Triquarterly and Southern Review.
She has served often as a judge for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry.
She is married to Phil Matero, and they have sons Andrew and Dante. They live in the San Fernando Valley.
Louise DeSalvo, Edvige Giunta, eds. (2003). "Poem". The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture. Feminist Press. ISBN 978-1-55861-453-6.CS1 maint: Uses editors parameter (link)
Jim Elledge, Susan Swartwout, eds. (1999). "When I think of America Sometimes (I Think of Ralph Kramdem)". Real things: an anthology of popular culture in American poetry. Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-21229-0.CS1 maint: Uses editors parameter (link)
Maggie Anderson; Dorothy Barresi; Quan Barry; Jan Beatty; Robin Becker; Richard Blanco; Christopher Bursk; Anthony Butts; Lorna Dee Cervantes (2007). Ochester, ed. American Poetry Now: Pitt Poetry Series Anthology. University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN 978-0-8229-5964-9.
Pamela Gemin, Paula Sergi, eds. (1999). Boomer girls: poems by women from the baby boom generation. University of Iowa Press. ISBN 978-0-87745-687-2.CS1 maint: Uses editors parameter (link)
Interviews
“Showcased Writer: Dorothy Barresi” "Silk Road". February 25, 2015. Retrieved September 23, 2015.
Reviews
Much contemporary poetry fits into one of the many aesthetic categories that lie between the polar opposites of the radically "experimental" poem and the "traditional," often formal, poem. Dorothy Barresi’s work, however, is singular in its resistance, better yet, rejection, of current poetic camps. Part Sylvia Plath, part John Donne, Barresi handles both surprise and expectation with deftness, displaying uncommon verbal ingenuity and intelligence of investigation. Her third book, Rouge Pulp, spins poems of startling metaphysical image shot through with slang and pop culture. Her narrators are bold, swaggering through the poems as if to say, if we’re all intersections of discourses nowadays, then their job is to speak those multiple voices as articulately as possible.