photo © Alfred Rucker

Barbara Ras was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1949. Her first book of poems, Bite Every Sorrow (Louisiana State University Press, 1998), was chosen by C. K. Williams to receive the 1997 Walt Whitman Award and subsequently won the Georgia Author of the Year Award for poetry. Her work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including Boulevard, Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, and American Scholar. She has received the Ascher Montandon Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and honors from the National Writers Union, Villa Montalvo, San Jose Poetry Center, Spoon River Poetry Review, and others. She has traveled extensively in Latin America and lived for periods of time in Colombia and Costa Rica, and in 1994 she edited a collection of Costa Rican fiction in translation entitled Costa Rica: A Traveler's Literary Companion (Whereabouts Press). She lives with her husband and daughter in Athens, Georgia, and is Senior Editor acquiring environmental books for the University of Georgia Press.