Ryan Varadi currently lives in Chicago, where he writes on the train on the way to work his retail job. He is working toward a debut poetry collection in which a young speaker grapples with Jewish generational trauma, midwestern boyhood, whiteness, heartbreak, and grief through the lenses of art and augury.

He holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where he received the Bernice Kert Fellowship and was nominated twice for the AWP Intro Journals Project. He received his BA in English from Northwestern University, where he won the Edwin L. Shuman Award for Poetry for two of his original poems.

He teaches online at The Porch and previously taught at UNCW and the Northwestern University Center for Talent Development. He has served as editorial staff for Ecotone, Chautauqua, and Helicon and as an intern for RHINO Poetry.

His work appears or is forthcoming in Cherry Tree, Poetry Northwest, and Frontier Poetry, among others.