Ryan Wilson (poet)

Ryan Wilson (born 1982) is a poet, editor, translator, literary critic, and academic from Baltimore, Maryland. He is the C.F.O. and Office Manager of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers, editor of Literary Matters, and an award-winning poet and essayist. His first collection of poetry, The Stranger World, was published in June 2017.

Ryan Wilson
Ryan Wilson, photo from Literary Matters
Born	1982 (age 37–38) Griffin, Georgia
Occupation	Academic, editor, literary critic, poet

Personal life

In December 1982, Wilson was born in Griffin, Georgia. He grew up in Macon, Georgia, and graduated from Tattnall Square Academy in 2000.

He earned a B.A. (English) from the University of Georgia, an M.F.A. (Poetry) from The Johns Hopkins University, and an M.F.A. (Poetry) from Boston University in 2008.[1] Currently he teaches at The Catholic University of America, and he serves as the chief financial officer and Office Manager of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers, while also serving as editor-in-chief of Literary Matters, the association's digital literary journal, in which he has published U.S. Poet Laureate, as well as winners of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant, the Stegner Fellowship, and many more of the nation's top prizes.. He lives north of Baltimore with his wife.

Publications

His works have been published in 32 Poems, Best American Poetry 2018, Birmingham Poetry Review, First Things, Five Points, The Hopkins Review, The New Criterion, The Sewanee Review, The Yale Review, and many other journals, including Poetry Daily and Verse Daily.

His first collection of poetry, The Stranger World, won the Donald Justice Poetry Prize and was published by Measure Press in June 2017. Mark Jarman said, "The Stranger World includes heartbreaking lyrics, haunting narratives, inspired translations, and finely honed satires. It is not simply consummate skill that is everywhere present in these well-wrought poems but, to echo the title of one of the best of them, authority. They are written with the authority of mastery."[2] Robert Pinsky wrote, "Ryan Wilson’s mastery of traditional forms serves a fresh, distinctive poetry of candor and meditation: soulful rather than brittle, more observant than performative. The idiomatic, American blank verse of Wilson’s 'Authority' and L’Estraneo is as fluent as that of Robert Frost, but with an oblique tenderness that reminds me of Frost’s friend Edward Thomas."

Awards

• Sankey Prize for Excellence in Poetry (Johns Hopkins University).
• Shmuel Traum Prize (Boston University).
• Eleanor Clark Award (Robert Penn Warren Circle), winner.
• Jacques Maritain Prize (Dappled Things), winner, 2015.
• Walter Sullivan Prize for Promise in Criticism (The Sewanne Review), winner, 2016.
• Donald Justice Poetry Prize, winner, 2017.

Further reading

• "Wilson, Ryan". Beltway Poetry Quarterly. Retrieved July 20, 2017. – Beltway Poetry Quarterly showcases the literary community in Washington, D.C., and the surrounding Mid-Atlantic region.