Ryan founded The Fischer-Harbage Agency in January, 2007 and has placed books for nine #1 New York Times bestselling authors. Ryan’s most lauded clients include Philip Bump, Jen Doll, Miranda Esmonde-White, Gina Frangello, Thomas Healy, Sunny Hostin, Alicia Menendez, Janet Mock, Taylor Plimpton, Rob Roberge, J. Ryan Stradal, and Toure. He represented Gérard de Villiers until the author passed away–his S.A.S. series has sold more than 120 million copies worldwide; Ryan continues to work on behalf of the estate.
Previously, Ryan was an editor at Simon & Schuster where he helped create and launch a new imprint, Simon Spotlight Entertainment (now Gallery Books). He also worked as an editor for Little, Brown & Company as well as Penguin Random House (where he edited books for Plume, Dutton, and Viking). He acquired and edited the Pulitzer Prize winning Boston Globe Spotlight Team’s Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church, which informed the movie Spotlight, winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture as well as Peter Singer’s New York Times bestseller The President of Good & Evil: Questioning the Ethics of George W. Bush. He has also worked with numerous other bestselling authors, including Michael Connelly, Matthew Diffee, John Feinstein, Malcolm Gladwell, Brad Listi, Alice Sebold and Danny Wallace.
For many years, Ryan taught courses on writing book proposals and fiction at The New School University’s MFA Program, Pratt, and Mediabistro. He addresses students and writers regularly at New York University’s MFA program, Sarah Lawrence College’s MFA program and conferences including The Colgate Writers’ Conference, Miami Writers Institute, The New Orleans Writers Conference, and The Writers’ League of Texas, among others. He has been quoted on writing and publishing in The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Poets & Writers, Publishers Weekly and on “Good Morning America,” among other outlets. Ryan is a graduate of Kalamazoo College, The Radcliffe Publishing Course and the Master of Fine Arts program in writing and literature at Bennington College. He lives with his wife and children in Brooklyn.