Born to a Jewish family in the tumultuous years of the rise of Nazism, her early childhood was spent fleeing her home with her parents.

Their bid for survival took them from their home of Berlin to Vienna and eventually to the Netherlands, whereby weiss and her parents left for the United States.

She went on to school in Switzerland and spent much time hitchhiking and writing - two skills that would prove pivotal to her future in the American Bohemian Beat scene.

weiss left home in 1949, at first staying in Chicago where she moved into the Art Circle - a housing community for artists.

In 1956, her friends Jack Minger, Sonny Nelson and Wil Carlson, opened a club called The Cellar, in which she would hold poetry and jazz sessions every Wednesday night.

[4] Eventually, weiss felt that she needed a break from city life and took off for California's Big Sur, a place made famous as a Beat center due to Jack Kerouac's novel of the same name.

In Breaking the Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers, weiss details the events at The Cellar following her departure.

[6] In 1957, weiss started a "salon kind of situation" in her apartment, creating a gathering space for poets and writers to read and discuss their works.

Upon reviewing her poem, the painter Paul Beattie asked if weiss could turn it into a film script, a request which she willingly obliged.

[5] She has published many poems and anthologies in recent years, including Full Circle/Ein Kreis vollendet sich (2002), a reflection on her escape from Nazi Germany.

An award winning feature documentary has been made about her life story called "ruth weiss, the beat goddess" directed by Melody C. Miller and produced by Elisabeth P.

[22][23] weiss credits Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, the French New Wave and Djuna Barnes, among many others, as her most significant influences.

On this night, there was a crowd of people in her building having a jazz jam session downstairs while weiss was preoccupied writing in her room.

She relished the haiku for the discipline it imposes upon the writer and the way it forces the "fat" to be cut away from the poem, revealing the most essential elements of language.

She described it as epitomizing the process that she went through with all her work: the idea of non-linearity, of beginning with a core and allowing the essential fragments that develop to become the substance of the piece.