Ryan Van Winkle

Ryan Van Winkle is an author and producer based in Edinburgh. His second collection, The Good Dark, won the Saltire Society’s 2015 Poetry Book of the Year award. 

He is currently Writer in Residence at the University of Edinburgh and the Schools Writer in Residence for the Citizen project at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

He is also the Creative Director of Golden Hour Productions which has been producing innovative live literature experiences since 2006. As a producer at Highlight Arts he has organized festivals and translation workshops in Syria, Pakistan and Iraq.

His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation and New Writing Scotland. He was awarded the Jessie Kesson fellowship at Moniack Mhor in 2018.

a world quiet as black
and white and warm
as an ironed collar. So,
I want to say sorry

for forgetting to hang
my shirt where my shirt belonged.
You could say I learned something

in the drain of this year,
in coffee grounds, stems
of basil and Chernobyl spewing
all over the radio. That city too

quiet in the summer, full of shadows paused
on garage doors. And tonight I stumbled
into a photo of trees felled in an eye,

all trunk and splinter
the way your spine dimpled
where it forked. So, I am sorry

for forgetting how love is, how supple
trees bend, how hard hearts break,
how the wind, the snow, the evacuated
rock and chaos.