Barbara Ras

Photo credit Anna Rucker

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 (selected by C. K. Williams) and also received the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. In 2004, Ras published an anthology of short fiction in translation, Costa Rica: A Traveler’s Literary Companion. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, among others. She has been honored with residencies at The Hermitage Artist Retreat, Ucross Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, San Ysidro Ranch Writers’ Residency, and the Rockefeller Center at Bellagio. Her work has appeared in more than 100 magazines and anthologies. Ras has taught at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson, as well as at workshops nationally and internationally. Barbara Ras worked for forty years in book publishing and is the founding director emerita of Trinity University Press in San Antonio. She now lives in Denver.

About the collection: Papers 1967-2020 (28 boxes) includes correspondence, literary publications, drafts and notebooks, materials from readings, workshops, and other events, photographs, and media. While the collection primarily documents Ras’s career as a poet, it also includes some of her editorial and teaching work.

• Ras, Barbara. The Blues of Heaven. Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 2021.
• Ras, Barbara. The Last Skin. New York: Penguin Books, 2010.
• Ras, Barbara. One Hidden Stuff. New York: Penguin Books, 2006.
• Ras, Barbara. Bite Every Sorrow. Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1998.
• Ras, Barbara, ed. Costa Rica: A Traveler's Literary Companion. San Francisco: Whereabouts Press, 1994.

Created Feb. 1, 2021; Updated April 1, 2022