Ruth Thompson grew up in California and received a BA from Stanford and a PhD from Indiana University. She has been an English professor, librarian, college dean, and yoga teacher in Los Angeles. She now lives in Hilo, Hawai'i, where she teaches writing, meditation, and yoga. Her poems have won the New Millennium Writings Poetry Award and the Harpur Palate Milton Kessler Memorial Prize, among others. Woman with Crows is her second book of poetry, and was a finalist for the A Room of Her Own Foundation's To The Lighthouse Prize in 2010. Her chapbook, Here Along Cazenovia Creek, was the basis for a collaborative performance of poetry and dance with Japanese dancer Shizuno Nasu. Her most recent book is Crazing.

Books by Ruth Thompson:

Other poems on the web by Ruth Thompson:
Two poems
"The White Queen"
"Dementia"

Ruth Thompson's Website.

Ruth Thompson on Twitter.

About Crazing:

"Ruth Thompson responds with extraordinary grace and playfulness to the scattering of her mental and physical abilities in old age, the 'crazing' of the glaze that gives the vessel its character, the cracks in the body's shell from which the spirit emerges like a baby chick. She mourns not for herself but for lost tree species, droughts, and future generations who may 'die thirsty, telling stories of our green shade.' Her acceptance of her personal body's limitations shows us a humbler, more sustainable way to inhabit the body of Mother Earth."
—Jendi Reiter

"Ruth Thompson's new book Crazing sings with beauty, loss, and hope. Her poems boom and soar, full of movement and sensory experience caught in gorgeous, chewable language. Some poets' work can be read silently: but these pieces demand to be read out loud with open throat, shoulders back, and feet ready to dance. Haul your poetry shorts on and get ready for the goose-bumps up and down your legs!"
—Sandra Hunter

"Ruth Thompson's Crazing is a map 'in rift-zones, thready tributaries.' Here Pythia's dementia is oracular, 'the rock itself/cracks, the mineral soul/exposed.' The body is a profoundly inhabited and permeable collaboration with the world: 'When I was a canyon, the sun scattered gold dust/down the walls of my forearms my breastbone's slide-tongue/into the childless pelvis of empty valley floor. / 'Who are you and what do you love?'' These poems vibrate on the page with essential, powerful life-force, in language as playful and gorgeously-lit as it is sharply wise. Thompson's work offers multiple intelligences we direly need in our mortal, vulnerable passage through this beautiful and difficult world, 'our great bright barge of stone and light.'"
—Jessamyn Smyth