Ruth Weiss (2) (1928–2020)

Ruth Weiss was born to a Jewish family in Berlin, Germany. Her parents were Oscar Weiss (Weisz), a news editor, and Flani Weiss. Her early childhood was spent fleeing the Nazis with her parents. Their journey for survival took them to Vienna, Austria, the Netherlands, and eventually to the USA in 1939. They settled in Chicago, Illinois, where Ruth excelled in school. In 1946, the family moved back to Germany, this time as American citizens, so her parent could work for the post-war U.S. Army forces. Ruth attended Neuchâtel College in Switzerland and spent much time writing and hitchhiking, two skills that would prove pivotal to her future. In 1949, weiss and her parents returned to Chicago.
She moved into the Art Circle, a house for artists and poets, where she began experimenting with combining poetry and jazz. In 1950, she hitchhiked to New Orleans and performed her innovative poetry in jazz sessions with musicians. In 1952 she moved to San Francisco, where she jammed and read her poetry with musicians weekly at The Cellar when it opened in 1956. She made her mark on American literary history as a pioneering jazz poet and member of the Beat Generation alongside Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Kenneth Rexroth, Jack Hirschman, and others. She changed the spelling of her name to all lower case letters. She wrote more than 20 books, including collections of poems, selections in anthologies, and her autobiography Can't Stop the Beat: The Life and Words of a Beat Poet (2011). She also wrote theater plays, painted watercolor haiku, and contributed prolifically to the magazine Beatitude, one of the first magazines for Beat writers.

In 1957, weiss started a "salon kind of situation" in her apartment, creating a gathering space for poets and writers to read and discuss their works.

In 1990, weiss won the Bay Area poetry slam and consequently released recordings of her poetry performances, entitled Poetry & Allthatjazz.

She appeared in, and was the subject of, several documentary films, including the award-winning ruth weiss, the beat goddess (2019). She left San Francisco in the 1970s and eventually moved to Albion, California.