About Ruth

Ruth Thompson is an award-winning poet and channel. She is the author of five books, most recently Quickwater Oracles: Conversations & Meditations (2021), winner of a 2022 Montaigne Medal and currently a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Awards Grand Prize.

Ruth began writing in her fifties, after freeing herself from an abusive marriage, about which she wrote in Woman With Crows. Her “transformative” poems, full of “wit and joy and celebration,” have been praised by Stanley Plumly, Philip Terman, Irving Feldman, Frank X. Gaspar, and many others. Her work has won New Millennium Writings, Harpur Palate, Chautauqua, Tupelo Quarterly, and other national awards, and has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize.

Whale Fall was choreographed and performed in Hilo, Hawai’i in 2018. Here Along Cazenovia Creek was choreographed and performed by the celebrated dancer 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 in Ithaca, NY with her partner, anthropologist-writer Don Mitchell (Shibai; A Red Woman Was Crying). She teaches poetry, meditation, and writing from the body.

Poems, videos of Whale Fall, Dancing the Seasons, and other performances, and information about upcoming workshops can be found on this website.

Quickwater Oracles,Whale Fall & Black Sage, Crazing, Woman With Crows, and Here Along Cazenovia Creek are distributed by Ingram and are available through all independent bookstores and at all online booksellers such as Amazon and Powell’s.

Contact: rt@wiasi.net