Ryan Lackey is a writer, critic, and PhD candidate in English at the University of California, Berkeley.

His criticism and fiction have appeared in Post45, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Commonweal, the Kenyon Review, Cream City Review, and elsewhere.

He has academic essays featured or forthcoming in collections on the millennial novel, contemporary fiction and masculinity, and religious readings of David Foster Wallace.

At Berkeley, his dissertation project categorizes contemporary Anglophone fiction’s attempts to create politically performative narrative forms—to respond to the neoliberal imperative to make a difference.

In an earlier life, he was an adjunct instructor and journalist in Portland, Oregon.