Ruth Bardon grew up in Highland Park, New Jersey, and lived in a number of midwestern cities before firmly settling in Durham, North Carolina. She received an MFA degree from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1982 and a PhD in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1995. Her poems have appeared in journals including Boulevard, The Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, Salamander, Moon City Review, and The Chattahoochee Review, and her first chapbook, Demon Barber, was published by Main Street Rag in 2020. She is also the author of Selected Short Stories of William Dean Howells (Ohio University Press, 1997).