Ruth Schwartz

Ruth L. Schwartz was born in Geneva, New York in 1962, and spent her childhood and early adulthood moving around the country. She left home at 16, received her B.A. from Wesleyan University and her M.F.A. from the University of Michigan, then made the San Francisco Bay Area her chosen home. She has also traveled extensively in Latin America, and speaks Spanish fluently. For many years, Schwartz made her living as an AIDS educator. She has taught creative writing at Cleveland State University and Goddard College, and currently teaches at California State University Fresno.

Schwartz' other books are Edgewater (Harper-Collins, 2002; National Poetry Series winner, 2001) and Accordion Breathing and Dancing (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996; Associated Writing Programs Competition Winner, 1994). She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Astraea Foundation for Emerging Lesbian Writers. Her poetry has won numerous national prizes, including Nimrod's Hardman/Neruda Award (twice), the Chelsea Editor's Prize (also twice), the New Letters Literary Award, the North Carolina Writer's Network Randall Jarrell Prize, and the Kalliope Sue Saniel Elkin Award.

Schwartz' poems have been anthologized in The World in Us: Lesbian and Gay Poetry of the Next Wave, American Poetry: Next Generation, The New Young American Poets, and elsewhere. In addition, she has published creative nonfiction in The Sun, the Utne Reader, and several anthologies.

SINGULAR BODIES
BY RUTH SCHWARTZ
$18.00. (email us for availability)

Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry (2000)

This numinous, deep-hearted collection explores the redemptive quality of love -- and its ability to hold even the hardest facts of physical life, disability and death in its enormous arms. These are generous poems. They deliver that most amazing of gifts: a faith that can be trusted, because it is not blind. -- Alison Luterman

Ruth L. Schwartz' poems are passionate and compassionate engagements with the sensuous richness that is this living world. Her empathy reaches broadly into every terrain and being, enlarging our understanding of the body's hunger not for continuance only, but above all for connection. There is not a poem in this book that could not be called a love poem. -- Jane Hirshfield

We need poets like Ruth L. Schwartz to remind us to listen, look, and hear one another's truths. Deft, sensual, and fearless.... Singular Bodies is a book not to be denied. -- Allison Joseph, Judge, 2000 Anhinga Prize for Poetry

About Accordion Breathing and Dancing, also by Ruth L. Schwartz: What I like so much about Schwartz' work is the way she asks us to think. This is poetry that refuses to confess, that asks instead of tells … It is poetry about death, grief and loss that reminds us why we want to live, poetry that asks us to choose life. -- Jo Ellen Green Kaiser, The Lesbian Review of Books