Ralph Sneeden

Ralph Sneeden is an American writer whose poems and essays have appeared in a broad range of magazines and literary publications including AGNI, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Harvard Review, The Common, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, The New Republic, Southern Review, Southwest Review, and The Surfer’s Journal. His work has also been featured multiple times on Poetry Daily and in The Second Set, a jazz poetry anthology edited by Yusef Komunyakaa and Sascha Feinstein. The title poem of his first book, Evidence of the Journey (Harmon Blunt 2007), received the Friends of Literature Prize from POETRY magazine/Poetry Foundation and was also runner up for the Shenandoah/Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers. In manuscript form, the book had been a finalist for the Walt Whitman Prize (Academy of American Poets), Yale Younger Poets Prize, Brittingham/Pollak Prize, Kathryn Morton Prize, Wick Prize, and New Issues Prize. In previous manifestations, his latest book of poems, Surface Fugue (Eastover Press, Nov. 2021), won the Best Book of the Year Award from the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. It was also a semi-finalist for the National Poetry Series and a finalist for the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize, the May Swenson Poetry Award, and the Cider Press Review Book Award. With degrees from UMass Amherst, the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, Sneeden is also a recipient of an emerging artist grant from the St. Botolph’s Club and fellowships from MacDowell, Columbia University and The American School in London. He has taught high school English for almost forty years and is currently the B. Rodney Marriott Chair in the Humanities at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where he has lived since 1995. While at Exeter, he has directed the George Bennett Fellow Writer-In-Residence Program and also co-founded the Exeter Humanities Institute, a popular experiential conference on discussion-based teaching that has been running for over twenty years. From 2012-2014, he created and directed the Damariscotta Lake Writers’ Conference—for teachers who write. Born in Los Angeles in 1960, Sneeden has spent most of his life in coastal New England. His collection of water-related personal essays, The Legible Element (EastOver Press), will be released July 2023.