My bio as written by Andrew Schelling in May of 2005:



Christopher Ryan was born on Martha’s Vineyard, offshore from Cape Cod, and lived on that seaward facing island until he was seventeen. That particular region—the sweep of lower Massachusetts coastline, Cape, and islands—might be considered Herman Melville territory with its historic economy founded on the whaling industry. At least one of the doomed crew on Melville’s notorious ship The Pequod was from the Gayhead Indian tribe of Martha’s Vineyard. This bioregional background seems more than coincidental to me. After Chris graduated with a B.A. from the University of Maine at Orono, he dedicated himself to animal rights and environmental activism. He has been at it eight or nine years. Two years ago he entered The Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University and will receive an MFA degree this May. Keeping to his writing, he meanwhile supports himself working for the Boulder-based Rocky Mountain Animal Defense. The Defense focuses on vegetarianism and prairie wildlife, especially the black tail prairie dog—a keystone species of the Front Range prairie ecosystem—which is threatened by what we have come simply & darkly to call ‘development’.

In a way this would be the Melville legacy. Moby Dick might be the finest grappling in an American book with the ethics of humans actively destroying wildlife for their own weird or obscure purposes. The dark underbelly of resource extraction. Chris Ryan’s writing often goes into this realm where frontier-mentality humans push up against the non-human residents of particular ecosystems. All of his poetry—even the love poems—focus on human conflict, and I find the struggle in his work to be the kind of through-a-glass-darkly ethics that have surfaced in our American writing since at least the days of Melville and Poe.

Chris’s graduating manuscript from Naropa, which he had begun by Autumn of 2003 when he first took a class with me, largely contains his stinging collection The Bible of Animal Feet. Auspiciously, that volume of poetry has been released by Farfalla Press, located here in Boulder. Chris has published work in Mountain Gazette, Hayloft, Effing Press, & the Maine Review, with new poetry in current or forthcoming issues of Sliding Uteri and Bombay Gin. He is currently at work on another serial poem titled “Norma.”