Ruth Awad is a Lebanese American poet, 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellow, and the author of Outside the Joy and Set to Music a Wildfire, winner of the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and the 2018 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. Alongside Rachel Mennies, she is the co-editor of The Familiar Wild: On Dogs & Poetry. She is the recipient of a 2020 and 2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry, Poem-a-Day, AGNI, The Believer, the New Republic, the Kenyon Review, Pleiades, the Missouri Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She lives in Columbus, Ohio.