Phyllis Mentzell Ryder was born in Ouagadougou, Burkina Fasso, and spent most of her childhood in Indonesia. After she composed a few rhymed stanzas in fourth grade, her father pronounced her a poet. When her family returned to the United States, she continued to write poetry throughout high school and college, eventually taking two post-graduate degrees in poetry, one from Johns Hopkins and one from the University of Arizona.

One day, however, she noticed that when she went to the library to read poetry, she found herself devouring articles on how to teach writing. Truly, it fascinated her: how should one comment on student papers? What assignments did students find exciting to write? So she attended the University of Arizona's program in Rhetoric Composition and the Teaching of English and earned her Ph.D. in 1997.

Dr. Ryder has developed a philosophy of teaching writing that asks students to consider seriously their ethical responsibilities as writers in a multicultural world. In a course called “American Ethnic Rhetorics,” for example, she asks students to investigate how their own experiences differ from the language practices of other Americans. In other semesters, she and her students study the rhetoric of the social protest to determine how rhetoric creates social change. Currently, she and her students examine the role of local community organizations in promoting (or possibly containing) American's civic participation.

Phyllis still writes poetry and meets regularly with a writing group in Maryland to workshop her poems, short stories and essays. For her scholarly research, she studies what it means to write for the public sphere. She also collaborates with Gelman librarian Jennifer Nutefall on articles about teaching information literacy.