Patrick Earl Ryan was born and raised in New Orleans in a family spanning five continents and seven generations in the city. His debut short story collection, If We Were Electric, was chosen by Roxane Gay as the winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award and published in 2020 at the height of the Covid pandemic. His stories about New Orleans have appeared in such journals and anthologies as Best New American Voices, Men on Men, and Gertrude; and he was the founder and editor-in-chief of the LGBTQ+ literary journal Lodestar Quarterly, which is still available online as a queer archive.