Ruth Whitman

• Name — Ruth Whitman • Birth Name — Ruth Bashein • Born — 28 May 1922 • Birthplace — New York City, New York • Died — 1 December 1999 • Place of death — Rhode Island • Occupation — Poet Translator Professor • Notable Works — Tamsen Donner: A Woman's Journey

• Illustration — Engraved artworks outside Back Bay station in Boston, installed in the 1980s as part of the Arts in Transit program. Whitman's work "If My Boundary Stops Here" is at left. Whitman received a B.A. and an M.A. from Radcliffe College, and also taught at Radcliffe, and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Collected Works of Ruth Whitman: Personas and Personhood (Wayne State University Press, 2026), edited by David Houghton, includes both published and unpublished poetry, and an updated text of Becoming a Poet. Her eighth and last book is Hatshepshut, Speak to me (Wayne State University Press, 1992), and her most well known work is Tamsen Donner: A Woman’s Journey. She also translated poetry from Yiddish, and wrote the beloved poem Sisters. Her honors and awards include a Senior Fulbright Writer-in-Residence Fellowship to Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a Bunting Institute Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. She won a 1969 National Jewish Book Award in the English Poetry category for The Marriage Wig and Other Poems. Her poems were published in literary journals and magazines including AGNI and Ploughshares. She was an early cooperative member of Alice James Books, and was the poetry editor for Radcliffe Quarterly from 1980 - 1995. Her papers are held at the Hollis Archives at Harvard Library.

The oldest daughter of Meyer David and Martha H. Bashein, né Sherman, Whitman was born on May 28, 1922, in New York City. At the time of her death, she lived in Middletown, Rhode Island, and was married to Morton Sacks, a painter, and had three children, Rachel, Lee, and David. Her first marriage was to Cedric Whitman and her second to Firman Houghton.