As a writer, I’m fascinated by the ways in which knowledge, memory, perspective, and pure make-believe interact to create stories, or prepare the emotional ground for moments of lyric insight. The interplay of fact, fiction, and memory is itself a major theme in my work, which employs mixed-genre or hybrid techniques, and often blurs the line between imaginative writing and creative nonfiction.
Photo by Brooklyn Kent, wbbjtv.com, Jackson TN
Winner of 2025 Individual Artist Fellowship in Poetry from the Tennessee Arts Commission
The Tennessee Arts Commission’s Individual Artist Fellowships provide recognition and acknowledgement of outstanding professional Tennessee artists who, through their work, add to the cultural vitality of the state.
“Ryan Guth’s work can’t be easily slotted into any single poetic form or tradition… a technique appreciated by this year’s poetry adjudicator who writes, ‘These multi-voiced sequences are wide-ranging and ambitious in their effort to convey divergent human lives and experiences, and in one case the multiple personalities of a single character. The poet’s formal choices for each piece propel each voice distinctively and successfully; the diction and syntax for each is clearly deliberate and evokes these multiple characters and their circumstances.’”
—Lee Baird, Director of Literary Arts for the Tennessee Arts Commission
LATEST BOOK
Down Into This Land
Selected poetry of Edgar Lee Masters
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