Poet, performing artist, critic, and literary historian, Donald Sidney-Fryer is the last in the great line of California Romantics that reaches from Ambrose Bierce to George Sterling, from Sterling to his protégé Clark Ashton Smith, and from Smith to his disciple Sidney-Fryer.
During his long career Sidney-Fryer has given dramatic readings across the U.S. and Great Britain. He has written and edited more than two dozen books and booklets. He has edited seven books by Smith, in addition to A Vision of Doom, fifty of the best poems by Ambrose Bierce, and Emperor of Dreams: A Clark Ashton Smith Bibliography.

As a poet he crafted Songs and Sonnets Atlantean (the first series), the final book to appear from Arkham House under the personal supervision of its founder August Derleth; as well as the Second Series, published by Wildside Press; and the Third Series, brought out by Phosphor Lantern Press; all now subsumed into an omnibus edition.

Moreover, Sidney-Fryer has accomplished his chief prosodic innovation, the creation of the Spenserian stanza-sonnet.
Although he resided in California during 1955–2017, the self-styled Last of the Courtly Poets presently lives in East Sandwich, Massachusetts.