Ruth Thompson is a poet and conscious channel. She is the author of six books, including JOURNEY BREAD (Broadstone Books, 2024), and QUICKWATER ORACLES, which won Hoffer, Montaigne, and First Generation book awards and was First Runner-Up for the Hoffer Grand Prize in 2022. Her poems have been praised for their joyous wit, intelligence, and mastery of poetic voice and form. A Californian, she has a BA from Stanford and a doctorate in English from Indiana. She now lives in Ithaca NY, teaches poetry and meditation, and edits Saddle Road, a small literary press.

Other poems on the web by Ruth Thompson:
Two poems
"The White Queen"
"In My Grandmother's Garden"

Ruth Thompson's Website.

About Journey Bread:

"Journey Bread is the Viaticum, the last meal, the bread on the tongue of the deceased as she makes her way to the Other World. But Ruth Thompson's rendering of this offering is very much about life, a vigorous and fascinating life, in poems that are energetic and vital — a woman's Hijra in words that marvel great distances: from anger and despair, through myth and memory, magic, outcry, love, and into joy, into wholeness. This is a wonderful book by a powerful and accomplished writer. "
—Frank Gaspar

"Aliveness abounds in all its generous and difficult graces in the poems of Journey Bread. In words that dance like colored silk and shine dark as crows, Ruth Thompson holds up beauty from the depths of oneness and from bright reaches 'where flying cannot go.' And in the in-between where we live—a 'dog grinning over his shoulder, jaybird yammering like no tomorrow,' 'a wing of rain / coming in slantwise under clouds,' visitations from crones and snow leopards, whales and crows—reminders that help is all around us in our long learning of gladness in the world."
—Diane Gilliam

Reflecting on a long and well-traveled life—in spirit as well as geography—Ruth Thompson chronicles wrong turns, demon wrestling, love lost and found, and the ongoing revelation of belonging to the natural world. Journey Bread moves through personal history via cultural stories: myths, fairy tales, legends, from the Oracle of Delphi to the White Queen to Mae West. But this journey arrives at a setting forth as sure as a summing up. She writes in 'Crazing':
Yes.        At last.        It's me.
Hallelujah!"
—George Ella Lyon

"Ruth Thompson's Journey Bread is a radical book – a recollection, exploration, and re-evaluation of a fully-engaged presence in a richness of styles and forms from a master poet. From narrative memories to dramatic monologues, from Greek to Sumerian to re-cast feminist folktales, from lyrics of love and nature to the spiritual world, the journey of this necessary collection is epic and the bread—the poetry — is its staff. Journey Bread moves me in many ways, through Thompson's unswerving devotion to the truth of a singular life 'singing the song of being alive.' "
—Philip Terman