Meet Ronna

Ronna Bloom is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently In a Riptide published by Brick Books in 2025.

A Possible Trust: The Poetry of Ronna Bloom, Selected with an Introduction by Phil Hall published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press was released in 2023.

Her work has been broadcast on the CBC, recorded by the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, translated into Bangla and Chinese, and shortlisted for several Canadian literary awards. 

Ronna has led initiatives to bring poetry into health care settings and into health professional education. She created the Poet in Community program at the University of Toronto and developed the first Poet in Residence program at Sinai Health. In these roles she offered students, staff, and health care professionals opportunities to articulate their experiences through poetry and reflective writing. She is a frequent guest speaker at universities, hospitals, community groups and institutions across Canada.

In her poetry booths, Ronna writes and prescribes poems for people on the spot. (Here she is prescribing poems on CBC.) Ronna brings twenty five years of psychotherapy practice to her work as a poet and facilitator.

A one minute film based on Ronna’s poem “Grief Without Fantasy” was made by filmmaker Midi Onodera and screened at the National Gallery in Ottawa. In a collaboration with PLANT Architects, her poem "The City" was painted 30 meters long on King Street in Toronto for the summer of 2018..