[3] Stone was born in Roanoke, Virginia and lived there until age 6, when her family moved back to her parents' hometown of Indianapolis, Indiana.

[5] Walter Stone, who served in World War II, received a PhD from Harvard, and taught at University of Illinois, and then at Vassar College.

When Stone received the Kenyon Review Fellowship in Poetry, she and Walter used the funds to buy a house in Goshen, Vermont, expecting that it would be a place to go in the summers, and to eventually retire.

Her heirs (both literary and family) — including her granddaughter, poet and visual artist Bianca Stone[12] — have established a foundation to convert the property into a writer's retreat.

The Ruth Stone Poetry Prize awarded by The Vermont College of Fine Arts and their literary journal Hunger Mountain is in its sixth year.