Her poems startle us over and over with their shapeliness, their humor, their youthfulness, their wild aptness, their strangeness, their sudden familiarity, the authority of their insights, the moral gulps they prompt, their fierce exactness of language and memory.-Galway Kinnell on presenting the Wallace Stevens Award In the Next Galaxy gives us the unflinching vision of a woman well into her '80s, fully inhabiting body and mind.-National Book Award Judges' statement Compassionate, comic, feminist and horrified by injustice, Stone's poems are composed with an accessible deftness.-The Oregonian Ruth Stone has earned nearly every major literary award for her poetry. She taught at many universities, finally settling at SUNY Binghamton. Today she lives in Vermont.