Ryder S.Wyatt holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts, a degree from Columbia University’s Teachers College in Executive Coaching, and a BA in Communications and Creative Writing from New England College, including a year at The University of London, studying Art History and English Literature.
As founder and director of the Cedar Ridge Writers Series, she hosts one-day workshops featuring guest instructors and speakers world-wide. Ryder was an associate editor with Brevity: A Concise Journal of Literary Nonfiction, Tiferet Journal, and Proximity Magazine. She is a committee member with the Nantucket Book Festival, in Nantucket, MA.
An avid gardener, Ryder chaired the Garden History and Design committee for the Somerset Hills Garden Club for more than a decade, garnering the GH&D Garden Club of America club award. She served as the New Jersey Zone IV Garden History and Design Representative for the Garden Club of American in 2020-2022 during the bicentennial of Fredrick Law Olmsted–the Father of Landscape Architecture– winning two GCA awards for a documentary film she wrote and collaborated on about Law’s life and career.
Her thirty-acre hay farm and 18th century home and gardens are listed with The Archives of the American Gardens of the Smithsonian Gardens in Washington, D.C.,which is dedicated to preserving and documenting unique and important gardens and landscape architecture throughout the United States.
Ryder interest in American history is deep.She is a member of the National Society of Colonial Dames in the State of New Jersey and a Mayflower descendant. In 1998, she was a founding member of the Board of Directors for the Jacobus Vanderveer House in Bedminster, New Jersey, a meeting place for General George Washington and General Henry Knox during the Revolutionary War. The house is now listed as a historical and national landmark and museum.
You can listen to the story of her farm , Cedar Ridge, once owned by her Grandparents, and where she grew up and moved back to with her husband and daughter in 1995, as told to Jennifer Jewell, host of NPR’s Cultivating Place, a weekly gardening radio broadcast.
Her current work has appeared in N Magazine, The New York Times, Punctuate, The Brevity Blog, Tiferet, Assay, Proximity Magazine, Punctuate, Hippocampus, Signal Mountain Review, Talking Writing, Minerva Rising Press, plus many other literary journals, blogs, and newspapers.
Ryder S. Wyatt 