Ruby Hansen Murray

Ruby Hansen Murray is a citizen of the Osage and Cherokee Nations, living in a commercial salmon fishing community in the lower Columbia River estuary. She’s the regular culture columnist for the Osage News, winning prizes from both Indigenous Journalists and Oklahoma Press Associations. Essays from her manuscript, An Osage Looks at the Pioneer Woman, have won The Iowa Review (2012) and Montana (2017 and 2024) Nonfiction Prizes, and Notable Best American Essays 2025, and are included in Cascadia: A Field Guide (Tupelo Press), Allotment Stories (Univ of Minnesota Press), and Shapes of Native Nonfiction (Univ of Washington Press). A chapbook, On Sunny Sands, that relates to the estuary, its ecology and changing demographics, will be published by Red Bird Chapbooks in 2027. Poetry from Star People and This Foreign Land, two completed manuscripts under submission appear in Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Hopkins Review, Ecotone, Moss, Beloit Poetry, Prism, South Florida Poetry Journal, and have been nominated for Push Cart, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net prizes. She received an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts with both fiction and creative nonfiction focus. Her work has been supported by fellowships from MacDowell, Tin House, Ragdale, Hedgebrook, Banff Centre, Storyknife, Sitka Island Institute, and Sitka Center for Arts and Ecology.