Ryan Vine is the author of The Cave (Texas Review Press, September 2025); WARD (Texas Review Press, 2021), finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award; To Keep Him Hidden (Salmon Poetry, 2018; 2nd ed. 2019), winner of the Northeastern Minnesota Book Award; and Distant Engines (Backwaters Press, 2006), winner of a Weldon Kees Award.
His poems have appeared or are forthcoming
in The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Rumpus, Blackbird, The Southern Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and on National Public Radio's The Writer's Almanac.
His honors include the Greensboro Review’s Robert Watson Poetry Prize, 2nd Prize in the National Association of Teachers of Singing Art Song Competition, an Artist Initiative Grant and a Creative Support Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, three McKnight/ARAC Career Development Grants, a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship in Poetry from the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and he has been a finalist or nominee for numerous others, including—selected by former US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky—the Dorset Prize.
He's been invited to read at universities, bookstores and festivals across the world: Milkweed’s Open Book, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Synagogue for the Arts, NYC; Clifden Arts Festival, Clifden, Ireland; Coffman Memorial Union, University of Minnesota; University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee; Poetry Ireland Headquarters, Dublin, Ireland; Zenith Bookstore, Duluth, Minnesota; and Carnegie Hall, NYC, to name a few.
He's also a first-generation college student who took his first job at Kentucky Fried Chicken. From there he went to Taco Johns, The Inn on Lake Superior, a driving range, and the production line at Swanstrom Tools. He flat roofed for Miller’s Roofing, served tables at Pizzaria Uno on Boylston Street, and was an editorial assistant at Houghton Mifflin. He picked boxes in a warehouse in Alston, tutored at Emerson College’s writing center, served tables at Old Chicago on Minnesota Ave, and wrote damn fine copy for a now-defunct internet startup. Currently, he is professor of English at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, MN.