Born in Murray, Utah on June 2, 1976, Ryan Shoemaker received a BA and MA from Brigham Young University-Provo before earning a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Southern California in 2014. At USC, he worked closely with novelists and short story writers T.C. Boyle and Aimee Bender.

Shoemaker works mainly in the short story form. He is the author of the short story collection Beyond the Lights (No Record Press, 2018), which was a semi-finalist for the St. Lawrence Book Award and a finalist for the Association for Mormon Letters Award for Short Fiction Collection. He has published short fiction in the Santa Monica Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Juked, Booth, Gulf Stream, and Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, among others.

Much of Shoemaker’s fiction explores contemporary Mormon life and culture, and has been published in many non-LDS venues and LDS venues like Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Sunstone, and Irreantum.

Shoemaker has taught at Brigham Young University-Provo and at the University of Southern California. In the summer of 2018, he was Writer-in-Residence at Brigham Young University-Hawaii. Currently, he is an assistant professor of English at Southern Utah University.

He lives in Cedar City, Utah with his wife and three children.