Deborah Dashow Ruth

Deborah Dashow Ruth with Mollie, Kensington, California.

INITIUM EST DIMIDIUM FACTI

(Once you've started, you're halfway there.)--Latin proverb



About Deborah Dashow Ruth

Orignally from Chicago, Deborah Dashow Ruth is a poet and playwright who lives in Kensington, California. A frequent participant at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Dashow Ruth is also a patron of the San Francisco Bay Area's literary and theatre arts communities.

Deborah Dashow Ruth studying with Lucille Clifton.

Biographical Information

Deborah Dashow Ruth: Writer, Reader, Theatre Lover, Cat Lover, and Ferroequiphile (lover of trains, especially steam locomotives).

In her professional life, she has taught English and served as an administrator for the University of California Berkeley's Extension Program for many years.

Born in Chicago, Dashow Ruth grew up in the suburb of Glencoe, attended New Trier High School (most notable classmate was Ann-Margret!), attended Wellesley College, graduated from the University of Chicago with an MA in English language and literature. She received a secondary teaching credential from the Graduate Internship Program at the University of California, Berkeley.

After teaching Engish briefly at the Hamlin School in San Francisco and at San Leandro High School, she was hired by U.C. Berkeley Extension to develop in-service courses and programs for teachers. After twenty years in that profession, she left in order to devote herself to writing.

In 1991, she was accepted by the Squaw Valley Community of Writers Poetry Workshop near Lake Tahoe in California's Sierra Nevada. Since then, she has attended the Community's summer workshops nine times and studied with numerous writers, including Galway Kinnell, C.K. Williams, Carolyn Kizer, Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, and Lucille Clifton.  She was accepted by the Vermont Studio Center to study poetry with Stephen Dunn; by the Centrum Arts Center at Port Townsend, Washington State to study with Billy Collins; and, by Flight of the Mind, McKenzie Bridge, Oregon, to study with Judith Barrington and Ursula LeGuin.

Dashow Ruth has published prose and poetry in numerous literary journals, and received two nominations for Pushcart prizes. A short-short story was a finalist for the 2008 Wilda Hearne Flash Fiction Contest.

She has been a member of the Dramatists' Guild since 2004. Two short plays garnered honorable mentions in play competitions; three short plays were chosen by the San Francisco Branch of the Dramatists' Guild for staged readings; and, a full-length play was chosen by the Virago Theatre Company for a staged reading held in Oakland, California. One short play, "True Colors," received first prize in a national 10-minute play competition sponsored by the McLain Theatre Arts Center in Virginia.

She is occasionally engaged in the visual arts, both in macro photography and in creating stone goddess sculptures out of found rocks. She has enjoyed several exhibitions of her photographs in the Loggia Art Gallery at the Berkeley City Club.

"One simply cannot be in a foul state of mind for part of the day and expect to arrive at her writing period in a pristine one." -- Gail Sher

Joyriding on an Updraft

Poems by Deborah Dashow Ruth.

Released Summer 2015

Sugartown Publishing

ISBN # 9780986334658

$16.95

6x9, perfect-bound, 146 pages

"An honor to have your extraordinary poetry collection! . . . Your poems are so fine -- courageous, honest!"

-- Peggy Sapphire, editor of 

    Disenfranchised Grieving

Success in life is mostly a matter of timing.

-- George Shearing (Interviewed on Morning Edition, National Public Radio, April 1995)