A graduate of Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles, Max Ritvo earned his BA in English from Yale University, where he edited a literary magazine and performed with a sketch comedy troupe, and his MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. He was a poetry editor at Parnassus: Poetry in Review and a teaching fellow at Columbia. Ritvo was diagnosed with Ewing's sarcoma at age 16 and died from the disease at his home in Los Angeles.