Born in Spokane, WA, Ryan Sharp spent most of his youth bouncing around the Pacific Northwest before his family set roots in Portland, OR. There he received his MFA in Writing from Pacific University while teaching English at a charter high school outside of Portland. Currently living in Austin, TX with his beautiful wife, Abigail, and two children, Judah and Eden, he is a PhD candidate in the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin where his research focuses on contemporary Black American persona poetry and how it is being employed to resist and revise archival representations of Blackness. He also teaches and serves as the Writers' Studio Coordinator at Huston-Tillotson University, a Historically Black University in East Austin. His poetry and reviews have appeared in several journals including Berkeley Poetry Review, Callaloo, Copper Nickel, DIALOGIST, and PANK. He has been the editor of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review since 2013.