Ryan Van Lenning

Ryan Van Lenning, M.A., is a poet, threshold guide, and founder of Wild Nature Heart. He is the author of the newly emerging THRUM books Becoming Beautiful Barbarians and Watershed, along with several previous poetry collections including One Bright and Real Caress, Trust the Ceremony, F*ck the Ceremony, Trust the Ceremony, From Inside These Wild Ones, An Ambitious Silence, Then Yeses Come Bubbling, Re-Membering: Poems of Earth and Soul, and High-Cooing Through the Seasons.

THRUM is a living literary ecology exploring imagination, grief, belonging, and cultural transformation in the threshold between the unraveling of old worlds and the emergence of more life-centered ways of being.

Ryan's poetry has received Toyon Literary Magazine's Jodi Stutz Poetry Award and appears in numerous journals and anthologies, including A Walk with Nature: Poetic Encounters that Nourish the Soul and Behind the Mask: 40 Quarantine Poems from Humboldt County. His essays and articles have appeared in Earth Island Journal, Truthout, and Deep Times: A Journal of the Work That Reconnects.

Through Wild Nature Heart, Ryan creates books, courses, gatherings, and rites of passage exploring ecological belonging, re-enchantment, grief tending, and the cultivation of deeper intimacy with the animate world. He has taught philosophy, comparative religion, environmental ethics, and facilitated programs such as Deep Belonging in the Great Turning, Write Your Wild River, and Earth Intimacies.

Ryan lives among the forests and rivers of Northern California.

"Bless Ryan Van Lenning for listening to the wild voices and bringing back the news for those who have lost their way. Bless him for reminding us of our original love affair with the earth and of what we know deep in our souls. His poems give wise counsel: let go of the debris, remember who you are, do not abandon your luminous thread."— Lorraine Anderson, editor of Sisters of the Earth and Eros & Earth