Ruth Madievsky

Ruth Madievsky is an American novelist, poet, and clinical pharmacist. She is the author of the novel All-Night Pharmacy and the poetry collection Emergency Brake (2016).

Early life and education

Madievsky was born in Chișinău, Moldova. Her family immigrated to the United States in 1993 when she was two years old, settling in Los Angeles as Jewish refugees. She grew up in West Hollywood, initially living with her parents, grandparents, and great-grandmother in a shared apartment in the Soviet diaspora area of the city.

She attended the University of Southern California, where she participated in the Trojan Admission Pre-Pharmacy (TAP) program. Madievsky earned her Doctor of Pharmacy (PharmD) from the USC Alfred E. Mann School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences. While attending pharmacy school, she pursued her interest in creative writing by attending events in USC's Creative Writing PhD program and arranged informal meetings with visiting author T.C. Boyle, to whom she would show her short stories.

Career

Clinical pharmacy work

Madievsky works as an HIV and primary care clinical pharmacist. In 2018, she received her HIV pharmacist credential and helped establish an inpatient HIV pharmacist service at her hospital.

Literary career

Poetry

Madievsky's debut poetry collection, Emergency Brake, was published by Tavern Books in 2016 as their 2015 Wrolstad Contemporary Poetry Series selection. According to her website, the collection spent five months on Small Press Distribution's Poetry Bestsellers list.

Madievsky won The American Poetry Review's Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize in 2017 for her poem "Wormhole." She was a 2015 Tin House Summer Workshop scholar in poetry.

Her poetry and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, Harper's Bazaar, The Cut, GQ, Tin House, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Guernica, Literary Hub, and the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day.

Fiction

All-Night Pharmacy, Madievsky's debut novel, was published by Catapult in July 2023. The book began as a linked short story collection that Madievsky started writing in 2014 while attending pharmacy school. The New York Times described it as "tender and hilarious." and was named to best or most anticipated book lists for 2023 by publications including NPR, The Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Literary Hub.

Other activities

Cheburashka Collective

Madievsky is a co-founder of the Cheburashka Collective, a community of women and nonbinary writers whose identities have been shaped by immigration from the Soviet Union to the United States. In 2019, she visited Moldova and Russia for the first time since her family's immigration.