Ruth L. Schwartz was born in 1962 and spent her childhood and early adulthood moving around the United States. She left home at age sixteen, received her B.A. from Wesleyan University and her M.F.A. from the University of Michigan, then settled in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1985. She worked as an AIDS educator for many years, and has taught creative writing at Cleveland State University and Goddard College. She teaches at California State University, Fresno.
Schwartz's first book, Accordion Breathing and Dancing, won the 1994 Associated Writing Programs Award and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1996. Her second book, Singular Bodies, won the 2000 Anhinga Prize for Poetry and was published by Anhinga Press in 2001.
Schwartz has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Astraea Foundation. Her other honors and awards include two Nimrod/Pablo Neruda Awards, two Chelsea Awards for Poetry, the New Letters Literary Award, the North Carolina Writers' Network Randall Jarrell Prize, Kalliope magazine's Sue Saniel Elkind Award, and a Reader's Choice Award from Prairie Schooner.
