Ryan is a current undergraduate student attending Brown University, double majoring in English and Economics with a focus on East Asian Studies.
Ryan is a graduate of Hunter College High School. Ryan served as Co-Editor-in-Chief of his school’s activism magazine, ACT Up, overseeing its editing, layout, and printing; in 2025, the magazine successfully distributed 50+ 40-page issues to students. He additionally serves as both the columns editor and columnist for his school magazine, What’s What. As Co-President of his school’s Chinese Diaspora Club, Ketang, he directed biweekly forums and activities centered on the Chinese diasporic experience. The Asian Cultural Society (ACS) holds a particular place in his heart; at its cultural show, Ryan performed in its Spoken Word segment, performing his original piece “Fiction.” He is a 4-year member and starting player of the Boys Volleyball Team.
At Hunter, Ryan took courses such as AP Mandarin, Medical Physiology, Honors Creative Writing (Short Fiction and Creative Writing), and pursued an English Independent Study where he created a writing portfolio with the guidance of his English teacher, who previously served as his writing mentor while he attended the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio Residential Program. He self-studied AP Literature and Language. In the fall of his senior year, he also took the course Asian American Communities and Mental Health at Hunter College, receiving an A as his final grade in the class. Ryan took the SAT in March of his junior year and scored a 1550 (760RW/790M).
From his time as a teaching intern for a ninth-grade class at his school, Ryan has received three main takeaways: a focus on human-forward learning, a love for reading student work, and a thank-you poem written by his students that now hangs taped to his wall. His responsibilities included designing lesson plans, giving students written feedback on their work, and, of course, teaching—though his favorite “responsibility” was meeting with students during and after class about their concerns over writing. Pedagogically, he believes less in prescribing a certain mode of writing and more in equipping students with the tools to succeed—establishing argumentative intent, organization, an eye for revision, and so on—so that they grow into their own authorial voices. Over the summers of 2023 and 2024, he additionally tutored at the New York Community League, designing and running a 6-week writing course teaching 12 under-resourced middle schoolers formal and creative writing.
Outside of school, Ryan served as an intern for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Education Department, where he primarily collaborated with his fellow interns to design an interactive community mural presented at Teens Take The Met—the museum’s largest event for teenagers in New York City, drawing around 3.7K visitors. The project centered around Jennie C. Jones’ rooftop exhibit at the Met, placing emphasis on how acoustic design informs personal history. He looks forward to continuing his work in the arts and education beyond the Met.
Ryan’s primary passion, however, lies in writing. He discovered poetry during his seventh grade during the pandemic, and has since developed what you may arbitrarily call a “poetic voice.” He was recently Runner-Up of the Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize and is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review. Other accolades include the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards (1x National Gold Medal, 6x Gold Keys, 6x Silver Keys), First Class Distinction for the NCTE Achievement Awards in Writing, and the National Prize for the Just Poetry!!! 27th Annual National High School Poetry Contest, amongst others. As an alumnus of the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio Residential Program, as well as the Kenyon Review’s Young Writers Residential Workshops, he understands that competition often supersedes passion and that high-brow, self-serious writing is rarely the only approach towards literature. He’s interested in language as both an extension and approximation of human experience, and approaches creative writing with a madcap zeal unfettered by concerns of prestige.
In his free time, Ryan enjoys scrolling through Wikipedia and watching reality television, and is on a perpetual hunt for the next-best energy drink (his favorite, for now, is Reign Body Fuel). He will—must—own two cats in his future. If you see him, please don’t hesitate to talk about anything and everything.