Carol Rubenstein was born on August 11, 1934, in New York, N.Y. She attended Bennington College in Vermont from 1951-1953, at which point she ran off to join a circus. Rubenstein later returned to New York and become a founding member of the Paul Taylor Dance Company in 1962. In 1969, she returned to Bennington College to complete her studies and obtain a Bachelor of Arts degree. In 1970 She obtained a Master of Arts degree from Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars.

In 1970 Rubenstein began her travels in Southeast Asia. In India and Nepal, she wrote her book of poems, The Third Meaning of Apricot: Concerning Its Light. She also traveled through Pakistan, Malysia, Borneo, Vietnam during wartime. Her essay “The Cultural Show: Is It Culture or What and for Whom” in the journal Asian Music documents these travels.

In August 1971, Rubenstein arrived in Sarawak, Malaysia and initiated a project to gather, transcribe, and translate the poetry and songs of the indigenous peoples of Sarawak, Malaysia. Her goal was to document a wide range of the Dayak oral poetry that was rapidly disappearing. In November 1971, she received a Ford Foundation Grant to fund this project. The on-site project concluded in 1974, and the resulting work was published in the Sarawak Museum Journal. In 1984, Rubenstein received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in Literary Translation to complete a second research project. This project was chiefly concerned with updating the circumstances and cultural use of the Iban Renong Song Cyle, the Bidayuh Brayun Song Cycle, and three Kelabit epics. Rubenstein returned to Sarawak in and conducted further on-site research, revisiting three of the seven groups she visited during the first project--from May 1985 to January 1986 on the National Endowment for the Arts grant, and from April 1987 to May 1989 in shorter trips while on visitor’s visas. Rubenstein moved to Ithaca, N.Y. in 1989 when the Cornell University Rare and Manuscript Collection requested to archive her translations and notes of Dayak oral poetry and songs.

In 2004, Rubenstein received a Saltonstall Foundation grant to fund travels to Poland for the creation of her long cycle of poem about Auschwitz, which she tentatively called “Vanished Number”. She remained active in Ithaca’s local poetry scene. She continued to write, hold residencies and publish in literary journals throughout her life, winning several awards and grants for her poetry and translation work. Rubenstein died on September 4, 2025.