Ruth Thompson

RUTH THOMPSON is an award-winning poet and channel. Quickwater Oracles is her first book of channeled work. She has published four books of poetry: Whale Fall & Black Sage, Crazing, Woman With Crows, and Here Along Cazenovia Creek. She began writing in her fifties, after freeing herself from an abusive marriage, about which she wrote in Woman With Crows. Her “fierce, gorgeous, sensual poems of earth-as-body and body-as-earth” have been praised by Stanley Plumly, Philip Terman, Irving Feldman, Frank X. Gaspar, and others. Her work has won New Millennium Writings, Harpur Palate, Chautauqua, Tupelo Quarterly, Crannog, and other national and international awards, and has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize. Whale Fall was choreographed and performed in Hilo, Hawai'i by dancers Jenn Eng, Karen Masaki, and Colee Garr in 2018. Here Along Cazenovia Creek was choreographed and performed by Shizuno Nasu of Japan in 2012. Ruth also performed with cellist Lee Zimmerman in Whitefish, Montana in 2019. Ruth received a BA from Stanford University and a doctorate in English from Indiana University. She has been an English professor, library administrator, book editor, and college dean in California. She now lives near Ithaca, NY with her partner, anthropologist-writer Don Mitchell. She teaches poetry, meditation, and writing from the body. Ruth talks about her work here.  Poems, videos of performances, and further information can be found here.