Ruth Ozeki is an acclaimed American-Canadian author, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest. Her literary works, which include the novels My Year of Meats (1998), All Over Creation (2003), A Tale for the Time Being (2013), and The Book of Form and Emptiness (2021), masterfully integrate personal narrative with pressing social issues. These novels explore themes such as science, technology, environmental politics, race, religion, war, and global popular culture, and have been translated into over thirty languages.

Ozeki's commitment to integrating diverse and complex subjects into her narrative forms has garnered her international recognition. Her third novel, A Tale for the Time Being, received the LA Times Book Prize, and was shortlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Book of Form and Emptiness won the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction, the 22nd Annual Massachusetts Book Award, the BC Yukon Book Prize, and the Julia Ward Howe Prize for Fiction. In addition to her novels, Ozeki's non-fiction work, The Face: A Time Code (2016), published by Restless Books, contributes to the innovative series called The Face.

Beyond her literary achievements, Ozeki is a renowned filmmaker. Her documentary and dramatic films, including Halving the Bones, have been showcased on PBS, at the Sundance Film Festival, and at colleges and universities throughout the United States. A dedicated Buddhist practitioner, she was ordained in 2010 and is affiliated with the Brooklyn Zen Center and the Everyday Zen Foundation.

Previously the Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities in the Department of English Language and Literature at Smith College, Ozeki is now Professor Emerita. Balancing her multiple identities, she is a dual citizen of Canada and the United States and divides her time between Western Massachusetts, New York City, and British Columbia, Canada.