Ryan James Wilson (born December 14, 1982) is an American poet, editor, translator, literary critic, and academic from Baltimore, Maryland.

"[2] Robert Pinsky wrote, "Ryan Wilson’s mastery of traditional forms serves a fresh, distinctive poetry of candor and meditation: soulful rather than brittle, more observant than performative.

In 2019, Wiseblood Books published Wilson's monograph, How to Think Like a Poet, which was previously awarded the Jacques Maritain Prize for Non-Fiction by the journal, Dappled Things.

Candid, eloquent, insightful, and, above all, passionately hospitable, How to Think Like a Poet invites us into poetic relationships, exchanges in which our minds creatively host the stranger-world while simultaneously enjoying that world’s lavish generosities.

Stallings has written: “This anthology of lyric poems and passages of epic, from antiquity to the 20th century, from Greek, Latin, Italian, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese, represents a sweeping literary education unto itself.” Fred Chappell noted, “These translations are respectful but not staid, accurate but not persnickety, renewing but not distorting,” and David Ferry added, “Wilson’s choices are always responsible and responsive, as manifested in the elegant music of his versification.” Former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Rosanna Warren, wrote: “One feels a lifetime of poetic art bound between the covers of this book.

Both Ryan Wilson’s lifetime—years of dedicated, disciplined, and devoted skill went into making this varying music for so many different voices—and the larger lifetime of the poetry of the West, the Classical tradition from Homer, Alcman, and Sappho to Trakl and Georg Heym.