Edgewater

"In Edgewater, her powerfully moving and redemptive third collection, Ruth L. Schwartz writes with consummate passion, precision, and honesty of the raw hungers that give rise to the world, human and natural. In poems both lyrical and grit-laced, she grapples with her twofold, central question: How can we love fully, open-eyed and openhearted amid all the flaws and beauty, each other and the world? How could we not?" —Jane Hirshfield

A popular and emerging voice in the world of poetry and winner of the National Poetry Series Open Competition

Established in 1978, The National Poetry Series has been instrumental in launching the careers of poets and writers such as Denis Johnson, Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Cole Swenson, Thylias Moss, Mark Levine, and Dionisio Martinez.

Selected by the poet Jane Hirshfield as the 2001 winner, Ruth L. Schwartz is the next poet to be added to that esteemed list. With a list of award-winning works behind her, Edgewater is yet another success for this widely anthologized young poet who will surely be writing for a long time to come.

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.