Born and raised in Japan, Ruth Forsythe moved to Minnesota to attend St. Olaf College in 1969.  After teaching high school in Minnesota and Tokyo, she completed an M.A. in Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota.  In 1976, she moved to Winona and started raising a family and completing her Ph.D., at which point she began teaching full-time in the English department at Winona State University. 

For the past twenty-five years, she has taught courses in comparative literature, non-Western literature, Bible as literature, modern fiction, composition, and ESL.  Her current research interests include genre studies, particularly the Kunstlerroman, and Asian diasporic writers, with recent articles focusing on the writing of Anjana Appachana, Bapsi Sidwa, and Kazuo Ishiguro. 

Beyond the pleasure of teaching and being part of the WSU academic community, she enjoys reading, cooking, running, and living in the country, where she and her husband, Jim, who is a lawyer, have raised their two children, Elizabeth, who is in law school, and Michael, who is a flight instructor.