Kay Ryan Biography and latest books by Kay Ryan

Kay Ryan (born September 21, 1945) is an American poet and educator. She has published seven volumes of poetry and an anthology of selected and new poems. Ryan was the 16th Poet Laureate of the United States from 2008 to 2010.

Biography
Ryan was born in San Jose, California, and was raised in several areas of the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert. After attending Antelope Valley College, she received Bachelor\'s and Master\'s degrees in English from University of California, Los Angeles. Since 1971, she has lived in Marin County, California, and has taught English part-time at the College of Marin in Kentfield. Carol Adair, who was also an instructor at the College of Marin, was Ryan\'s partner from 1978 until Adair\'s death in 2009.
Her first collection, Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends, was privately published in 1983 with the help of her friends. While she found a commercial publisher for her second collection, Strangely Marked Metal (1985), her work went nearly unrecognized until the mid 1990s, when some of her poems were anthologized and the first reviews in national journals were published. She became widely recognized following her receipt of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2004, and published her sixth collection of poetry, The Niagara River, in 2005.

In July 2008, the U.S. Library of Congress announced that Ryan will be the 16th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress for a one-year term commencing in Autumn 2008. She succeeded Charles Simic. In April 2009, the Library announced that Ryan would serve a second one-year term extending through May 2010. She was succeeded by W.S. Merwin in June 2010.

Very recently in 2011, Kay Ryan also won the Pulitzer Prize for The Best of It: New and Selected Poems that was appreciated for her witty, rebellious yet tender, a treasure trove of an iconoclastic and joyful mind.

Her poetry
The Poetry Foundation\'s website has characterized Ryan\'s poems as follows: "Like Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore before her, Ryan delights in quirks of logic and language and teases poetry out of the most unlikely places. She regards the \'rehabilitation of clichés,\' for instance, as part of the poet’s mission. Characterized by subtle, surprising rhymes and nimble rhythms, her compact poems are charged with sly wit and off-beat wisdom”

Ryan\'s poems are often quite short. In one of the first essays on Ryan, a critic wrote: Ryan reminds us of the suggestive power of poetry–how it elicits and rewards the reader’s intellect, imagination, and emotions. I like to think that Ryan’s magnificently compressed poetry signals a return to concision and intensity

Ryan can also be funny, but it is rarely without a sting… her tight structures, odd rhymes and ethical judgments set her work apart

Poetry collections
•    1983: Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends
•    1985: Strangely Marked Metal
•    1994: Flamingo Watching
•    1996: Elephant Rocks
•    2000: Say Uncle, New York
•    2005: The Niagara River
•    2008: Jam Jar Lifeboat & Other Novelties Exposed
•    2010: The Best of It: New and Selected Poems