Ruth Danon is a Clinical Professor of Creative and Expository Writing at New York University’s Paul McGhee Division, School of Continuing and Professional Studies. She is the founding director of the Summer Intensive Creative Writing Workshops and runs the School’s creative writing programs. In 2010, she received the SCPS Teacher of Distinction Award.
She is the author of two books, Work in the English Novel (Croom-Helm, 1985) and Triangulation from a Known Point (North Star Line, 1990), a collection of poems. A chapbook of her poems, Living with the Fireman, was published by Ziesing Brothers in 1980. Her poetry and prose have appeared in The Paris Review, BOMB, Fence, Third Bed, Crayon, The New Hampshire Review and other literary journals, and was anthologized in Best American Poetry 2002, edited by Robert Creeley.
Ruth was born in Chicago, of refugee parents. When she was five, she moved with her mother and grandmother to Binghamton, New York, where her mother worked as a psychiatrist at what was then called the Binghamton State Hospital. The family lived on the hospital grounds. This experience is the basis of the memoir she currently is writing. She now lives in New York City with her husband, the painter Gary Buckendorf.