Aidan Ryan is a writer, publisher, and arts curator from Buffalo, New York.

Photo: Mark Dellas

Aidan's extensive nonfiction credits include memoir, travel writing, arts criticism, profiles, and narrative journalism in outlets including Humanities, The Millions, The Adroit Journal, CNN, Longreads (as an editor’s pick), and Traffic East, where he is a senior editor. From 2014-16 he was a regular contributor to Scotland’s The Skinny, writing feature-length reviews of albums and music festivals in Europe and the U.S. and interviewing artists such as St. Vincent, CVRCHES, C Duncan, and the theraminist Lydia Kavina. He has also interviewed and profiled artists and public figures including George Saunders, Lloyd Cole, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and The Goo Goo Dolls. His interview with George Saunders originally published in The White Review is anthologized in Interviews with George Saunders (University of Mississippi Press, 2022). He has produced book-length essays and longer works of arts criticism and cultural history for the Burchfield Penney Art Center and Canisius College.

Aidan’s fiction and poetry have appeared in The Xavier Review, Slipstream, and other journals. His poems are anthologized in Silo City Reading Series: Ten Years of Poems in Grain Silos, edited by Noah Falck in 2022, and Best New Poets 2019, edited by Cate Marvin. He won the 2017 Just Buffalo Members Competition Prize for poetry, judged by Janet McNally. In 2017, Linoleum Press published Aidan’s limited-edition artist book of visual poetry, Organizing Isolation: Half-Lives of Love at Long Distance.

Alongside his own writing, Aidan is a cofounder and publisher of Foundlings Press, which has produced books, chapbooks, anthologies, broadsides, and archival works by new and established authors such as Forrest Gander, C.D. Wright, D.A. Powell, Mary Ruefle, Frank Stanford, and many others. At Foundlings, Aidan joined Max Crinnin as co-editor of Constant Stranger: After Frank Stanford (2018), a seminal anthology celebrated as a groundbreaking contribution to the study and discussion of Frank Stanford's poetry. He also conceived of and served as managing editor for the anthology My Next Heart: New Buffalo Poetry (BlazeVOX books, 2017).

Aidan has curated multidisciplinary art events and exhibitions in partnership others artists and cultural organizations. He is Literary Curator-in-Residence at Artpark in Lewiston, New York, where he launched and oversees a “mini-residency” bringing poets and writers to the organization’s 150 acres of outdoor art and performance space above the Niagara River Gorge. Through Carrowduff Arts, a multidisciplinary arts advisory and production company, Aidan has curated, presented, and consulted for a wide range of arts programs, performances, and initiatives.

Aidan was born and raised in North Buffalo. He earned his B.A. at Canisius College and earned his MSc in United States Literature at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He also studied at the W. B. Yeats International Summer School in Sligo, Ireland. He has taught English literature and creative writing at Canisius College, as a junior high instructor, and as a teaching artist at the Just Buffalo Writing Center, and he has been a guest speaker at Canisius College, SUNY Geneseo, George Mason’s School of Law, and elsewhere. He has volunteered for a variety of arts organizations, including three years as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Irish Classical Theatre Company in Buffalo, where he helped to steer the organization through the pandemic, the first executive transition in its 35-year history, a move into feature film-quality digital productions, and the first North American productions of new works by celebrated playwrights Brian Delaney and Marina Carr.

  • Keep NYS Creating Grant, NYSCA/NYFA, 2020

  • Just Buffalo Literary Center Member’s Competition Judge’s Award (from Janet McNally), 2017

Writing

Editing & Publishing

Curation & Consulting

Roots

Awards