Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, Sharon Bryan earned a BA in philosophy from the University of Utah, an MA in anthropology from Cornell University, and an MFA from the University of Iowa. She is the author of the poetry collections Salt Air (1983), Objects of Affection (1987), Flying Blind (1996), and Sharp Stars (2009), which won the Isabella Stewart Gardner Poetry Award.
 
Bryan’s work as an editor includes Where We Stand: Women Poets on the Literary Tradition (1994) and Planet on the Table: Poets on the Reading Life (2003), which she co-edited with William Olsen. She has been a visiting professor at the University of Connecticut and Dartmouth College, and her awards include two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in poetry. She has been a poet-in-residence at The Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire.