Ruth Joffre

Ruth Joffre was born and raised in Northern Virginia. Her mother was born in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in 1950, and Ruth has taken her mother’s maiden name to honor her. Ruth earned her BA from Cornell University and her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. After graduate school, she moved to Seattle, where she served as the 2020-2022 Hugo House Prose Writer-in-Residence and co-organized the Fight for Our Lives performance series. She now lives in Columbia, MO. In 2023, she will be a visiting writer at University of Washington Bothell and George Mason University.

Ruth is the author of the story collection Night Beast, which was longlisted for The Story Prize. Her work has been shortlisted for the Creative Capital Awards and been supported by residencies at The Arctic Circle, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Lighthouse Works, and the Whiteley Center. Her fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Gulf Coast, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Wigleaf, the anthologies Best Microfiction 2021 & 2022, and elsewhere. Her interview series with the authors, editors, and curators of craft books and resources is freely available in Catapult’s Don’t Write Alone and the Kenyon Review blog.