Ryan James Wilson (born December 14, 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, essayist, and literary translator. His first collection of poetry, The Stranger World, was published in June 2017. In 2019, his monograph, How to Think Like a Poet, was published by Wiseblood Books, and in 2021 his Proteus Bound: Selected Translations, 2008-2020 was published by Franciscan University Press. Ryan Wilson received an Honorable Mention for his poem For a Dog in the Rob Frost Farm Poetry contest in 2015.
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."
In 2019, Wiseblood Books published Wilson's monograph, How to Think Like a Poet, which was previously awarded the Jacques Maritain Prize for Non-Fiction by the journal, Dappled Things. George David Clark, editor of 32 Poems, wrote of the monograph: “With an uncommon clarity and a uniquely graceful erudition, Ryan Wilson challenges us to think faithfully about our art and artfully about our faith. Candid, eloquent, insightful, and, above all, passionately hospitable, How to Think Like a Poet invites us into poetic relationships, exchanges in which our minds creatively host the stranger-world while simultaneously enjoying that world’s lavish generosities. Ultimately, these pages offer nothing less than the radical welcome of the authentically Christian imagination.” 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.”
In December 2021, Franciscan University Press published Wilson's Proteus Bound: Selected Translations, 2008-2020. Of this book, 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.” Fred Chappell noted, “These translations are respectful but not staid, accurate but not persnickety, renewing but not distorting,” and David Ferry added, “Wilson’s choices are always responsible and responsive, as manifested in the elegant music of his versification.” Former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Rosanna Warren, wrote: “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.”
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.
Robert Lee Frost was an American poet. His work was initially published in England before it was published in the United States. Known for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech, Frost frequently wrote about settings from rural life in New England in the early 20th century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes.
Richard Purdy Wilbur was an American poet and literary translator. One of the foremost poets of his generation, Wilbur's work, composed primarily in traditional forms, was marked by its wit, charm, and gentlemanly elegance. He was appointed the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1987 and received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice, in 1957 and 1989.
William Stanley Merwin was an American poet who wrote more than fifty books of poetry and prose and produced many works in translation. During the 1960s anti-war movement, Merwin's unique craft was thematically characterized by indirect, unpunctuated narration. In the 1980s and 1990s, his writing influence derived from an interest in Buddhist philosophy and deep ecology. Residing in a rural part of Maui, Hawaii, he wrote prolifically and was dedicated to the restoration of the island's rainforests.
Michael Dana Gioia is an American poet, literary critic, literary translator, and essayist.
X. J. Kennedy is an American poet, translator, anthologist, editor, and author of children's literature and textbooks on English literature and poetry. He was long known as Joe Kennedy; but, wishing to distinguish himself from Joseph P. Kennedy, he added an "X" as his first initial.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
— W. H. Auden, from "September 1, 1939"
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Wally Swist is an American poet and writer. He is best known for his poems about nature and spirituality.
Joseph Fasano is an American poet and novelist. Fasano was raised in Goshen, New York, where he attended Goshen Central High School. He earned a BA in philosophy from Harvard University in 2005 and an MFA from Columbia University in 2008. His poem "Mahler in New York" won the 2008 RATTLE Poetry Prize. He has been a finalist for the Missouri Review Editors' Prize and the Times Literary Supplement Poetry Competition, among other honors. He has taught at SUNY Purchase, Manhattanville College, and Columbia University.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
