About

Barbara Ras is the author of You Can’t Have It All, The Blues of Heaven, The Last Skin, named Best Book of 2010 by the Texas Institute of Letters, One Hidden Stuff, and Bite Every Sorrow, which won the Walt Whitman Award and also received the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is the editor of a collection of short fiction in translation, Costa Rica: A Traveler’s Literary Companion. Ras has received fellowships from Bread Loaf, the Guggenheim 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 Writer’s Residency, the Ucross Foundation, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, the Vermont Studio Center, and Altos de Chavόn, in the Dominican Republic.  

Ras has published poems 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 “The Marginalian” (formerly “Brain Pickings”) and Maria Shriver’s “The Sunday Paper,” as well as in videos produced by the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum and Sam Gilberg. Her papers have been collected by the Sowell Collection at Texas Tech.

Ras has taught in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson and at workshops nationally and internationally. With the International Writing Program, she has traveled on trips of cultural diplomacy to Tunisia, Morocco, Nepal, and Kyrgyzstan. Through the Fulbright program, she taught at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa.

For four decades, Ras had a distinguished career in book publishing. She was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and still has the ocean in her blood. She now lives in Denver.