Ruth Carr was born in Belfast where she lives and works as a freelance tutor and editor, concerned with raising the profile of women in literature. In 1985 she edited The Female Line, the first anthology of women’s writing to come out of Northern Ireland (Northern Ireland Women’s Rights Movement, Belfast, relaunched as an e-book with herpress in 2016). She compiled the section on contemporary women’s fiction in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing IV/V (Cork University Press, 2001), was a co-editor for The Honest Ulsterman poetry magazine for about 14 years, and she has written an essay on Word of Mouth Women’s Poetry Collective (of which she was a founding member) in the recently published Female Lines (New Island, 2017). Her poetry has appeared in a wide range of anthologies and journals and she has read to audiences in places including Derry/ Londonderry, Strabane, Armagh, Dublin, London, Lancaster, Moscow, Oslo and of course, her home city, Belfast. She has published three collections: There is a House and The Airing Cupboard (Summer Palace Press, 1999 & 2008) and most recently, Feather and Bone (Arlen House, December 2017). "[Her] poems combine a disciplined craftsman’s feel for imagery and rhythm with personal qualities that I can only sum up with inadequate clichés like warmth and deeply-felt humanity." Louis Muinzer.
About her last collection she said: "Mary Ann McCracken was born in Belfast in 1770, Dorothy Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth in 1771. Their paths never crossed yet their lives shared similar preoccupations and activities - reading, letter writing, enthusiasm for the ideas of The Enlightenment, the education of the poor, the abolition of slavery and lifelong devotion to a more conspicuous brother. In writing about them I have kept to the facts - where there are facts - but I have drawn on my imagination to respond to these two women’s deep and lengthy lives. There are lots of gaps - this is not a biographical history. These poems are essentially a personal response to two remarkable women."
Photo courtesy of Malachi O'Doherty