Barbara Ras is the author of four poetry collections: The Blues of Heaven (Pitt Poetry Series, 2021), The Last Skin (Penguin, 2010), which won the Texas Institute of Letters Best Book of 2010, One Hidden Stuff (Penguin, 2006), and Bite Every Sorrow, which won the Walt Whitman Award and also received the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Ras has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, which supported her residency at the Bellagio Center in Italy. She has also been a resident at the San Ysidro Ranch Writers’ Residency, the Ucross Foundation, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, the Vermont Studio Center, and Altos de Chavόn, in the Dominican Republic. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Tin House, Granta, Five Points, American Scholar, Massachusetts Review, and Orion, as well as in many other magazines and anthologies. Her work has been featured in the podcast “Love What You Love” and in the online newsletters “Brain Pickings” and Maria Shriver’s “The Sunday Paper,” as well as in a video produced by the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. She is the editor of a collection of short fiction in translation, Costa Rica: A Traveler’s Literary Companion. Ras has taught in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson and at workshops nationally and internationally. For four decades, Ras had a distinguished career in book publishing. She is the founding director emerita of Trinity University Press and lives in Denver.