Ryan Shaver

Ryan Shaver, the editor of the school’s Lost-N-Found Gazette, is a fellow member of a poetry group whose older poets admire his perspective. His role turns on a contradiction: a magazine devoted to things found and passed along becomes the means by which he takes Hannah Baker’s private poem and makes it public without her consent.

Identity and the Gazette

Ryan is introduced as another high schooler in the poetry group, valued by its older members for his perspective. He also runs the school’s Lost-N-Found Gazette, a publication built from quirky material gathered into brief issues and left for students to discover around campus.

The Gazette’s circulation is deliberately informal. Ryan prints fifty copies, staples them together, and leaves them in changing locations, including restrooms, locker rooms, and the track. He describes the placements as never being in the same spot, so finding the magazine resembles stumbling across the items it collects. This playful method gives the publication an air of serendipity, but it also makes its contents easy to encounter beyond the control of the people whose words appear in it.

The poem and its exposure

After poetry-group meetings, Ryan and Hannah sit on the library steps and talk. At first, their conversations include laughing about the poems other group members have written and read, establishing a shared literary setting before the relationship is recast by the poem’s publication.

Hannah identifies the central breach plainly: Ryan stole her poem. She later challenges him for taking it from her notebook, printing it in the Gazette, and letting other people read it. The poem was not a lost piece of writing for Ryan to collect; Hannah stresses that he had neither found it nor acquired any right to publish it. Its placement in a magazine distributed at random around school transforms private writing into material available to an unpredictable audience.

Ryan had called the poem scary and had asked Hannah about it, believing that it expressed more than even he could work out. Hannah’s account confirms that he recognized its depth, yet that recognition did not lead him to protect its privacy. Instead, other readers dissected and made fun of the poem. The harm therefore lies not only in the taking and printing, but in the exposure of vulnerable writing to judgment and ridicule.

Narrative role and significance

Ryan’s episode is narrated through Hannah’s address to him on her recordings. That form gives the account the force of a direct accusation, while also limiting the reader to Hannah’s remembered interpretation of what he did; the available account does not provide Ryan’s response or an independent explanation of his intentions.

The Gazette’s name and practice sharpen the episode’s irony. Ryan’s magazine gathers items that people might otherwise overlook, but Hannah’s poem was not abandoned or waiting to be found. By treating it as collectible material, he collapses the distinction between discovering something lost and taking something that was deliberately private. The incident links literary attention to responsibility: understanding that a poem carries meaning is not the same as respecting the person who wrote it.