Dr. Ryan Sharp
Assistant Professor

Interests
Black American Literature
American 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
- ETS 2300: Introduction to Ethnic Studies
Bio
Ryan Sharp's areas of interest include contemporary Black US literature and poetics, Black and ethnic studies, and creative writing. He received his doctoral degree from the University of Texas at Austin and is an assistant professor of English at Baylor University. His poetry, articles, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in several journals including African American Review, Callaloo, Copper Nickel, MELUS, and PANK.
Selected Publications
Books
Another Throat: Twenty-First-Century Black US Persona Poetry and the Archive (University of North Carolina Press, 2024)
- This monograph examines the Black US historical persona poetry projects that begin to trend during the early twenty first century. Through the poetry of Elizabeth Alexander, Cornelius Eady, Adrian Matejka, Patricia Smith, Natasha Trethewey, and Frank X Walker, this book reads these projects’ capacity for conjuring Black speakers as a countermeasure against the archival silencing and misrepresentation of Black subjects and histories.
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.