Dr. Ryan Sharp

Interests

Black US Literature
US Literature
Black and Ethnic Studies
Contemporary Poetry
Creative Writing

Education

Ph.D. University of Texas at Austin
M.F.A. Pacific University
B.A. Concordia University-Portland

Courses Taught

• ENG 2304: American Literature
• ENG 2310: American Literary Cultures
• ENG 3376: African American Literature
• ENG 4385: Contemporary Poetry
• ENG 5395: Contemporary American Literature
• ENG 5396: American Studies Seminar
• ETS 2300: Introduction to Ethnic Studies

Bio

Ryan Sharp is an associate professor of English and the Director of Ethnic Studies at Baylor University. His research interests include contemporary Black US literature and poetics, Black and ethnic studies, and creative writing. Sharp’s articles, poetry, and reviews have been published or are forthcoming in several venues including African American Review, Callaloo, Langston Hughes Review, Copper Nickel, MELUS, and PANK. His monograph, Another Throat: Twenty-First-Century Black U.S. Persona Poetry and the Archive, was published by the University of North Carolina Press. 

Selected Publications

Books

Another Throat: Twenty-First-Century Black US Persona Poetry and the Archive  (University of North Carolina Press, 2024)

• “Through readings of poetry that are startling in their clarity and cleverness, Sharp argues that Black writers have inhabited different kinds of poetic personas (the dead, the imagined, and even the nonhuman) to undo acts of silencing and to explore the complex relationship between Blackness and the archive. He might be the best reader of twenty-first-century Black poetry that we have.” (GerShun Avilez, author of Black Queer Freedom: Spaces of Injury and Paths of Desire)

my imaginary old man: poems (Finishing Line Press, 2017) 

• Ryan Sharp’s propulsive, incantatory lines create something from nothing and then make it sing. my imaginary old man: poems crafts a new world with an embodied father-absence at its center like a protean being. By turns tender and fierce, haunting and mourning, the chapbook explores “the image one / creates to fill the heart shaped hole the fool / gold the shine in the oil slick the sick / lion the most cunning the fox.” Like all most deeply imagined things, its hybrid old man lives on even when the poems end. This brilliant meditation on complicated loss and lineage marks Sharp as a voice and mind to watch. (Sasha West, winner of National Poetry Series and author of Failure and I Bury the Body)

Articles

“The Unspeakable in Cornelius Eady’s Brutal Imagination.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 52.2, Jan/Feb 2023, 192-209.

“Respeaking the Spoken: Elizabeth Alexander’s Amistad and the Archive.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 45.3, 2020, 83-103.

“In the Shadow of the Archive: The Big Smoke and Black American Persona Poetry.” African American Review 52.4, Winter 2019, 373-387.