Biography
Ruth Nolan, M.A., is a native of the Mojave Desert circa Apple Valley and Associate Professor of English College of the Desert near Palm Springs, CA. She is also a poet, writer, and book editor/publisher. For two summer seasons, 1986-87, she worked for the BLM as a helicopter hotshot and engine crew firefighter in the California Desert District, and has extensively hiked, traveled, and embraced the essence of her desert homeland. Her poetry collections include: Negotiating With Testosterone (1995, Northern Arizona University;) Wild Wash Road (1996) and Dry Waterfall (2008) (both by Petroglyph Books.) Her poems have recently appeared in Pacific Review, Mosaic, Poemeleon, San Gabriel Valley Quarterly, Fishtrap Anthology 2007, San Diego Poetry Annual 2007, Genie, Haiku Journal Summer 2008, and Inlandia: A Literary Journey through Southern California's Inland Empire (Heyday Books, 2006.) Ruth is also editing an anthology of California desert literature for Heyday Books, to be published in 2009. She is advisor and editor of the new California desert literary magazine, Phantom Seed. She has not yet been nominated for a Pushcart, she has not yet won a major literary award or had a chapbook published – somethin’ to do with spending too many years running around the deserts and southwestern rivers hiking, canoeing, camping, fighting forest fires, having her beautiful, in-killer-shape-ass photographed for future porn exhibits in the cum-Internet era, and morphing into one mythopoetic oneness with nature....and of course in the latter years, being busy teaching full-time at the sweatshop (at the advice of a real, old-time Freudian therapist - cigar, Rorschak, the whole deal - leaning back in his smoke cloud in his dark-wood-paneled office that turning point of a day almost 10 years ago: you have a choice: do you want to join the society of life, of writers, and take your turn in the pecking order of the publishing and po-hustler, networking, alliance-building, 'I've got your back, you've got mine, doesn't matter we don't have English degrees or master's in serious literature of the world not to mention, haven't read much but contempo-rary po-etry, shades of John Ashbery, however you want to catagalize it, go lick a tree and inside out on your carve, the smooth morning of sycophants, twerping the dweeb, oh how I wanna be' - MFA's only cost $40k or so but it's well worth it, marry that judge or bankruptcy lawyer, just think you'll never have to teach inner city high school English or - sigh- well, you're obviously taking the hardest route possible thinking you have somethin' to prove to this tough mutha-fucka universe and bust some caps out there as a single woman with a small child, go out and save those Compton kids from their alternative high school hell, maybe one less in the CYA, maybe one less parent shot in their sleep, maybe one more girl who grows up without slitting her arms to spaghetti - so you'll just hafta go work with the masses of the poor to cover your coke habit! - and take that nice English teaching job they're offering you at the sweatshop of all muthas, the underpaid community college system, College of the Desert - OR, A BONE RATTLER'S FATE: be a poet starving on a rock?) All you hafta do, with your Master's Degree in English Rhetoric, Composition,and Literature, with an emphasis in Creative Writing, is read piles of English 50 essays, spend only 10 hours per week on top of nurturing students in the fine art of sentence-writing and proper semi-colon usage and subject-verb agreement, and then back to your fine art of juggling single mom-hood: that’s what happens when yr Lakota Indian ex ends up spending your child’s formative years in and out of prison for various offenses, such as murder, drug trafficking, domestic violence, and so forth, but I hear that he’s on parole (again, again) and doing pretty well with his new Lakota Indian girlfriend, detailing cars and not drinking – well hey, it’s lucky that this Ruth Nolan-hole, as my cantankerous 20-year-old calls me, has time to write a fuckin’ poem - She is twice a Vermont Studio Residency Recipient and is a longtime student and friend of the famous, Claremont-Tufts award-winning poet, Pete Fairchild (good friend, great poet- you go, Pete, now let's go fishing at Deep Creek! Just saw him the other day and he shook his head, and said, "Ruth, write fiction." I swear all I did was look at him.) Oh yeah – I’m thinking of the punk rock group “X”: “Who’ll bring the Flag?” One of those nice figurative language mind leaps that somehow got me singing “Los Angeles” from “Under the Big Black Sun.” I remember how I got sorta beat up at that show in Reseda at the Country Club, circa 1981 or something, when I was too naïve to know what slam-dancing was. Wow, how this poetry marketplace has shown me otherwise – hold onto my overalls suspender! Exene, you were right!
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