Ruth Beaumont Cook is a freelance writer and the author of four corporate histories as well as numerous articles on business and the arts for local, regional, and national publications. She also teaches workshops in communication skills.

Cook grew up in Bedford, Ohio, and received her undergraduate degree in German and English education from The Ohio State University. She came to Alabama in 1970 where she now helps plan the annual Writing Today Conference at Birmingham-Southern College and serves on the Board of Directors of the Alabama Writers Forum.

Her first commercially published book, North Across the River: A Civil War Trail of Tears, was published by Crane Hill in 1999 and reissued in paperback in October 2000. It tells the stories of several families arrested by General Sherman's troops in the summer of 1864 and charged with treason for working in textile mills supporting the Confederacy. North Across the River is the result of two and a half years of research in the Southern History Collection of the Birmingham Public Library and the Atlanta History Center as well as extensive interviews with descendants and visits to the actual sites of the original cotton mills in Georgia. Cook even made a trip to Cannelton, Indiana, on the northern banks of the Ohio River, where at least 50 of the displaced Georgia workers finally settled. More...

Cook’s second book of narrative history, published by Crane Hill in 2007, is an Alabama story set during World War II. Guests Behind the Barbed Wire narrates the true story of Camp Aliceville in Pickens County, Alabama, where as many as 6,000 German prisoners of war were housed during World War II. It discusses how the residents of Aliceville helped build, operate, and supply the camp, and then become inextricably intertwined with camp life and the German POWs held there. Focusing on the relationships between the captured Germans and local Americans, this title investigates the nature of war, peace, and the principles of human dignity. More...