Heralded by Dana Gioia as “among the best poets of his generation” and widely considered one of the premier literary editors in America, Ryan Wilson was born in 1982 in Griffin, Georgia, and raised in nearby Macon. As Orlando Ricardo Menes has written in The Notre Dame Review, Wilson’s “command of craft is at the highest echelons of accomplishment,” and he is “the inheritor of such august poets as Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur, and even Theodore Roethke.”
His first book, The Stranger World (Measure Press, 2017), won the prestigious Donald Justice Poetry Prize. Of The Stranger World, Mark Jarman wrote, “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.” Robert Pinsky (US Poet Laureate from 1997-2000) added: “Ryan Wilson’s mastery of traditional forms serves a fresh, distinctive poetry of candor and meditation: soulful rather than brittle, more observant than performative.” Reviewing The Stranger World for Catholic World Report, the celebrated philosopher-poet James Matthew Wilson (no relation) wrote: “I must reserve the highest praise, however, for this first book by Ryan Wilson, which I consider a most astonishing debut, one that shows the poet a master of the complexity and formal subtlety found in those great and anguished poets of the twentieth century, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and especially Robert Lowell. Poetry’s union of meter, metaphor, and memory’s mysterious depths is what has always made it the chief art form of every culture, and Wilson’s work testifies to its power to lead us into the darkness of human experience and to let us linger there in exploration.” James Matthew Wilson further expatiated in his review: “The mystery of reality is just this: the material and literal is always going beyond itself, signifying something more, so that particular and universal, concrete and abstract, material and spirit, sacred and secular, are always interpenetrating one another. Such was the lesson of such seventeenth century metaphysical poets as George Herbert and John Donne. Wilson reclaims their legacy as a successor to the midcentury modernists who have clearly given shape to his poetic voice.”
In 2019, Wiseblood Books published Wilson’s How to Think Like a Poet, which was previously awarded the Jacques Maritain Prize by the Catholic journal Dappled Things. Of this celebrated monograph, which has been used in high school and college classrooms around the country, the renowned poet and editor George David Clark wrote, “With an uncommon clarity and a uniquely graceful erudition, Ryan Wilson challenges us to think faithfully about our art and artfully about our faith. In so doing, he urges each of us to be more fully human, more fully the incarnate poem our maker intends.” Acclaimed poet Rachel Hadas added, “At once heartening and challenging, hortatory and inspiring, Wilson’s homiletic essay is a gentle but powerful companion on any poet’s path.” Prof. Ernest Suarez noted, “This is an extraordinarily intelligent, insightful, and sensitive book, one in the tradition of Cleanth Brooks, Edward Hirsch, and other critics who know how and why poetry and literature matter.”
In 2021, Wilson’s Proteus Bound: Selected Translations, 2008-2020 was published by Franciscan University Press. This volume contains Wilson’s translations from seven languages (not counting dialects) spanning from Homer to the mid-twentieth century. As Oxford Professor of Poetry A.E. Stallings has written, “This anthology of lyric poems and passages of epic, from antiquity to the 20th century, from Greek, Latin, Italian, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese, represents a sweeping literary education unto itself. In the appropriately titled Proteus Bound, Ryan Wilson speaks in tongues, and is spoken through, generously putting his gifts of technical aplomb and a tuneful ear at the service of other poets, across cultures and millennia.” The late Fred Chappell, winner of the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, wrote, “These translations are respectful but not staid, accurate but not persnickety, renewing but not distorting. In these pages, even Virgil is fun once more.” Grace Schulman, winner of the Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement, exclaimed, “What a treasure! This invigorating book brings us close to some of the most beautiful lyric poems ever written…,” and Charles Martin, winner of the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, added, “Nothing renews the tradition more certainly than the attentions that a poet-translator of Wilson’s caliber gives to the great poems of the past.” Rosanna Warren, former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, concluded: “One feels a lifetime of poetic art bound between the covers of this book. Both Ryan Wilson’s lifetime—years of dedicated, disciplined, and devoted skill went into making this varying music for so many different voices—and the larger lifetime of the poetry of the West, the Classical tradition from Homer, Alcman, and Sappho to Trakl and Georg Heym. The elegance of Wilson’s verse is breathtaking: Horatian, really—alacrity, subtlety, wit, naturalness. This book is a civilization. May it enlighten and delight many.”
In 2024, Wilson’s book In Ghostlight: Poems was published by LSU as part of the celebrated Southern Messenger Poets Series, edited by Dave Smith. Of this book, National Book Award-finalist Shane McCrae writes, “These are brilliantly clear poems to read and read again, poems to study and to love. Few American poets working in rhyme and meter today could write poems to match them.” National Book Critics Circle Award-winner Rodney Jones adds, “I have been waiting for a poet like Ryan Wilson, an unapologetic formalist whose metrical agility is precise and varied, and whose uncamouflaged rhymes unleash an intelligence that is at once wild and sensible. In Ghostlight explores the veils that bind past and present, and all resonates from a singular emotional depth. Wilson’s ghosts are real. There is no one else like him.” And former NEA Chair and California Poet Laureate Dana Gioia notes, “In Ghostlight is a major book. With this virtuosic second volume [of original poems], Wilson places himself among the best poets of his generation. His formal mastery is dazzling. If there were a decathlon in metrics, Wilson would take the gold. What distinguishes the book, however, is how deftly Wilson uses those forms to create expressive music to pursue his themes of faith and failure, class and culture, memory and mortality. He shows traces of his sources–Wilbur, Hecht, Baudelaire, Eliot, even Robinson–but only to demonstrate how completely he has assimilated them into his own high lyric style. How thrilling to read such an ambitious new book.”
In 2024, Wilson also published Contemporary Catholic Poetry: An Anthology, co-edited with April Lindner, via Paraclete Books. A finalist for the Foreword Reviews Book Prize, this book was heralded by Lee Oser, former President of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers, as “The definitive anthology of contemporary Catholic poetry in America and an important contribution to American letters more broadly.” Acclaimed poet and biographer Paul Mariani writes, “Read it, friends, page by page, soak it all up and take in the music and pathos and beauty of what real poetry has to offer.” And Mark Bauerlein, Senior Editor of First Things, concludes, “This anthology should be a standard assignment in every Catholic school in the English-speaking world.”
Ryan Wilson’s work has been published widely in periodicals such as 32 Poems, Birmingham Poetry Review, First Things, Five Points, The Hopkins Review, Image, Literary Imagination, The New Criterion, Quarterly West, The Sewanee Review, and The Yale Review, and his poems have been anthologized in Best American Poetry and Christian Poetry in America Since 1940, among others, as well as featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily.
From 2016-2024, Wilson was Editor-in-Chief of Literary Matters. Under his editorship, Literary Matters published original works by U.S. Poets Laureate and winners of The Nobel Prize for Literature, the Pulitzer Prize, The National Book Award, The National Book Critics Circle Award, The Bollingen Prize, The Kingsley Tufts Award, The MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant, The Frost Medal, The American Book Award, The Poets’ Prize, The Wallace Stevens Award, and The Yale Younger Poets Prize, among many other honors. Contributors to Literary Matters during his editorship include: Kim Addonizio, Willis Barnstone, David Bottoms, David Bromwich, Fred Chappell, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Carl Dennis, Stephen Dunn, David Ferry, Amy Gerstler, Rachel Hadas, Edward Hirsch, Rodney Jones, Maxine Hong Kingston, Yusef Komunyakaa, Ted Kooser, David Lehman, Brad Leithauser, Timothy Liu, Shane McCrae, Amit Majmudar, Thylias Moss, Linda Pastan, Don Paterson, Marjorie Perloff, Robert Pinsky, D.A. Powell, Christopher Ricks, Mary Jo Salter, Grace Schulman, Charles Simic, Dave Smith, Isaac Bashevis Singer, A.E. Stallings, Jean Valentine, Rosanna Warren, C. Dale Young, and David Yezzi.
From 2016-2024, Wilson also served as the C.F.O. and administrator of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW), an international non-profit that promotes the study of literature in both creative and scholarly contexts.
In 2004, Wilson graduated from The University of Georgia, where he studied under Sabrina Orah Mark and Claudia Rankine. In 2007, he earned an M.F.A. from The Writing Seminars at The Johns Hopkins University, where he was awarded the Sankey Prize for Poetry, and in 2008 he received a Master’s degree from Boston University, where he studied under Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, and Rosanna Warren, and where he was awarded the Schmuel Traum Prize for Translation. Since 2008, Wilson has published more than 150 poems, translations, essays, and reviews, and his critical work has received The Walter Sullivan Prize for Criticism from The Sewanee Review and the Eleanor Clark Award from The Robert Penn Warren Circle, in addition to the Jacques Maritain Prize from Dappled Things. For the academic year 2019-2020, he was one of three poets selected to be readers for The Georgia Poetry Circuit, and he has given dozens of readings and lectures around the country, including recent events at: Berry College, The Catholic University of America, Columbus State University, Hillsdale College, Loyola University-Chicago, Mercer University, The New School (New York), The University of Notre Dame, The Philadelphia Free Library, The University of Pittsburgh, The San Diego Public Library, Texas A&M University, The University of St. Thomas-Houston, The University of Tennessee-Martin, and Villanova University, among others.
Aside from his literary endeavors, Wilson enjoys athletics (especially baseball, basketball, and hiking), old films, music, and the theater. Happiest outdoors among the woodlands and farmlands, he lives in Washington County, Texas, and he teaches in the M.F.A. program at The University of St. Thomas-Houston.