Ralph Sneeden was born in Los Angeles in 1960 and grew up on Long Island and the North Shore of Massachusetts.  His poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, The Adroit Journal, The American Poetry Review, The Common, Ecotone, Harvard Review, New England Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Slate, The Southampton Review, Southern California Review (now Exposition), The Southeast Review, Southwest Review, and The Surfer's Journal.  The Legible Element: Essays, his most recent book, was released in July, 2023 by EastOver Press. His second book of poems, Surface Fugue, was published by EastOver Press in November 2021. The title poem of his first book, Evidence of the Journey (Harmon Blunt, 2007), received the Friends of Literature Prize from POETRY magazine, and others in it appeared in The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The New Republic, Slate, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly and other magazines.  His work has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize and anthologized in The Second Set: The Jazz Poetry Anthology Vol. 2 (edited by Sascha Feinstein and Yusef Komunyakaa, University of Indiana Press); Under the Legislature of Stars: 62 New Hampshire Poets (forward by Maxine Kumin); and Poet Showcase: An Anthology of New Hampshire Poets

He has been teaching English since 1983, most recently at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire from 1995-2022, where he was the B. Rodney Marriott Chair in the Humanities. He holds degrees from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (BA) , Middlebury College (MA) and Warren Wilson College (MFA), and has also been a Joseph Klingenstein Fellow at Teachers College/ Columbia University, a Chubb LifeAmerica Fellow at The MacDowell Colony, the Bergeron Fellow at The American School in London, and recipient of an Emerging Artist Award from the St. Botolph's Club Foundation.

One of the founding leaders of the Exeter Humanities Institute, he has run workshops on discussion-based teaching at many schools across the US, and also in the UK, Philippines and Chile.  From 2012-2014, he founded and ran the Damariscotta Lake Writers' Conference (a conference/colony for teachers who write) in Nobleboro, Maine.

He lives in New Hampshire with his wife Gwen Evans-Sneeden. They have three children and two grandchildren.

Links of interest:   Ralph Sneeden discusses his poem "Cow's Neck" on the NH Laureate/New Hampshire State Council on the Arts website: Poets Showcase