Ryan Stephen Thornton

Ryan Stephen Thornton is a poet whose work slips between the cracks of queer history, desire, and everyday divinity. Salt-Rimmed Breath on Jazz-Thigh Gospel is his latest collection—a tender, irreverent, and unruly hymn to longing, softness, maximalist bisexual embodiment, and the awkward holiness of being alive in a body you’re still learning to love. These are poems that witness, that reach, that crack jokes mid-confession. A kiss wrapped in kitchen foil. A gospel scribbled in biro on the back of a bus ticket.

His poetry has been published in Hearth & Coffin, Powders Press, Impostor Journal, Cape Magazine, and coalition works, and tends to appear wherever bodies are complicated and language gets caught in its own teeth.

Ryan is also a queer historian, PhD researcher, and Visiting Lecturer in Theatre & Performance at York St John University. His research and creative work explore queer archives, performance, and the politics of poetic witness.

He lives in York, owns too many velvet jackets, and is currently building an app that maps the city’s queer past through poetry, creative prompts, somatic rituals, and historical footnotes—because the archive, like the body, always has more to say.