Born in 1949, Ruth Mendelsohn grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and graduated from the University of Oregon. In 1978, she moved to Maine where she lived, among other places, in Portland and East Vassalboro.

She worked as a journalist for the Lewiston Daily Sun, and as a freelance writer. Her chapbook, Sixteen Pastorals, won the first Maine State Commission on the Arts & Humanities’ poetry chapbook competition in 1982. This chapbook, published by Theodore Press of Bangor, was Mendelsohn’s first-ever poetry submission, for which she won $100.

Ruth died in 2009 in Scarborough, Maine at the age of sixty.