Janet Ruth grew up in southeastern Pennsylvania, lived for almost 20 years in Washington, D.C. and Virginia, five years in Colorado, and has called Corrales, New Mexico home since 2001. As a child she enjoyed cross-country family camping trips, watching birdfeeders with her Mom, and going small game hunting with her Dad (she was the “dog”!). Much of her life has revolved around birds. This included her doctoral dissertation at George Mason University—“Effects of vegetation structure and surrounding land-uses on avian communities in the floodplain forests of Maryland”—and continued through field research with U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), resulting in scientific papers about winter grassland bird habitat preferences, songbird migration patterns in the US-Mexico borderlands using NEXRAD weather radar, and breeding ecology of Grasshopper Sparrows in southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico. She has retired from a career as a research ornithologist although she continues to publish scientific manuscripts as an emeritus scientist.

Janet and her husband, Dave Krueper, have enjoyed international birding/ photography/writing trips to Panama, Mexico, Belize, Peru, Brazil, Kenya, Tanzania, Madagascar, South Africa, and Australia. She writes daily journals during the trips and mines these volumes for poem and story ideas. In addition to the poems and stories in this book, she has published a story about their trip to the Atlantic rainforest of Brazil—“Brazil’s Beautiful Mountain – Serra Bonita”—in Birding magazine. Janet’s poetry and stories are tightly bound to and inspired by her connections with the natural world. She often thinks of them as embodying all of the observations from the world around her that wouldn’t fit into her scientific manuscripts.

She is a member of the New Mexico State Poetry Society (NMSPS) and participates in the NMSPS Albuquerque Chapter, as well as multiple events in Albuquerque’s active poetry community. She has had poems published in Grey Sparrow Journal, Bird’s Thumb, Santa Fe Literary Review, Duke City Fix, and The Ekphrastic Review. She also has poems in regional anthologies including: VALUE: Essays & Poems by Women of a Certain Age; A Poets Picnic: a Celebration of Nature, Calligraphy, Music & Poetry; four volumes of Poets Speak Anthology – HERS, WATER, WALLS, and SURVIVAL; and Weaving the Terrain: 100-Word Southwestern Poems.  In June 2018 she published her first book – Feathered Dreams: celebrating birds in poems, stories & images.