Ricky Aiello Jr. is a writer and artist from New York, living in Ventura County, California, with his wife and their animals.

His work moves between fiction, poetry, and visual art. His fiction focuses on ordinary people, memory, work, love, loneliness, and the quiet things people carry, often drifting between realism and something less certain. 

His poetry comes from the same place, but it's louder. It moves by image, interruption, memory, and accident. The poems jump before they explain themselves and often leave behind something stranger than an answer. He treats the page like material, breaking language apart and letting fragments sit beside each other until they begin making their own kind of sense.

Aiello spent much of his adult life working in management before finding his way to ranch work, horses, and writing more seriously. That path became part of the way he sees people: through work, contradiction, humor, responsibility, and the distance between who someone appears to be and what they are actually carrying.

Across his work, Aiello is less interested in explaining a feeling than leaving behind the evidence of it: an object, a joke, a bruise, a room, a sentence that does not quite behave. His work stays close to imperfect people who get lost, make bad decisions, love each other badly and beautifully, start over, and occasionally stumble into moments of grace. 

He studies poetry through California Institute of the Arts.

He is the author of The Sound of Pennies Falling and the Places They Go, a novel written over six years.

Most days, he can be found somewhere between writing, making art, and working with his horse, River.