Tony Barnstone's notable books of poetry include Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki , winner of the John Ciardi Prize in Poetry, the Grand Prize of the Strokestown International Poetry Festival, the Independent Publisher Book Award, the Poets Prize, and fellowships from the California Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2012 the duo Genuine Brandish released Tokyo's Burning: WWII Songs, which is an album based on Tongue of War. Barnstone collaborated with Genuine Brandish on the album’s lyrics and arrangements. Barnstone's other poetry titles include: Pulp Sonnets, Beast in the Apartment, The Golem of Los Angeles, which won the Benjamin Saltman Award in Poetry, Sad Jazz: Sonnets, and Impure. Impure was a finalist for both the Walt Whitman Prize and the National Poetry Series. Barnstone’s poetry has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, and Spanish. Barnstone's translations include Mother is a Bird: Sonnets by a Yi Poet, poems and Illustrations by Jidi Majia. Co-translated into English by Tony Barnstone and Ming Di. Translated into Yi by Heire Zihan, River Merchant's Wife, Chinese Erotic Poems, The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry, The Art of Writing: Teachings of the Chinese Masters, Out of the Howling Storm: The New Chinese Poetry and Laughing Lost in the Mountains: Selected Poems of Wang Wei. Barnstone has published expansive college textbooks on world literature. With Willis Barnstone as his co-editor, he edited and published Literatures of Asia, Africa and Latin America, which explores Asian literature from the Vedic period to Haruki Murakami. The book also covers African literature from The Shipwrecked Sailor to Mohamed Mrabet. Selections from the Sub-Sahara explore "oral creation myths" to modern day fiction and poetry by Ben Okri, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, J.M.Coetzee, Mia Couto, and Dambudzo Marechera. The teachings on the literature of the Americas spans from Pre-Columbian era poems in Quechuan languages to writings by 20th century figures including Derek Walcott, Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, V. S. Naipaul and Giannina Braschi. Other textbooks include The Literatures of Asia and The Literatures of the Middle East, the latter co-edited with Willis Barnstone. With Michelle Mitchell-Foust he co-edited Human and Inhuman Monstrous Verse and Dead and Undead Poems.
