Raised in Rochester, NY, Ilie Ruby is the author of The Salt God’s Daugh­ter (Sep­tem­ber 2012) and the crit­i­cal­ly-acclaimed nov­el, The Lan­guage of Trees. She attend­ed the Uni­ver­si­ty of South­ern Cal­i­for­ni­a’s Pro­fes­sion­al Writ­ing Pro­gram, where she was fic­tion edi­tor of The South­ern Cal­i­for­nia Anthol­o­gy. Fol­low­ing her life­long inter­ests in edu­ca­tion and writ­ing, she has worked as a 5th grade teacher, an edi­tor of fic­tion and non­fic­tion for pub­lish­ing hous­es, and in film pro­duc­tion on a PBS series. Ruby is the win­ner of the Edwin L. Moses Award for Fic­tion, cho­sen by T.C. Boyle; a Kerr Foun­da­tion Schol­ar­ship; and the Phi Kap­pa Phi Award for Cre­ative Fic­tion. She is a recip­i­ent of the Wes­leyan Writer’s Con­fer­ence David­off Schol­ar­ship and the Bar­bara Kemp Award for Out­stand­ing Teach­ing. Ruby, also a painter, lives near Boston with her hus­band and three children.