Kay Ryan ’67, M.A. ’68

In July 2008, Kay Ryan ’67, M.A. ’68 was appointed serve as the Library of Congress’s 16th Poet Laureate for 2008-09.

For more than 30 years, Ryan has been a part-time teacher of remedial English at the College of Marin in Kentfield, Calif., which has allowed her to dedicate much of her free time to poetry. She says she enjoys re-examining the beauty of the everyday. Her work is full of wit and philosophical questions. Her lines are all very short, often no more than two or three words, giving a playful quality to her poetry and allowing them to be accessible to people with differing poetry predilections.

Ryan describes poetry as an intensely personal experience for both the writer and the reader. "Poems are transmissions from the depths of whoever wrote them to the depths of the reader,” she says. “To a greater extent than with any other kind of reading, the reader of a poem is making that poem, is inhabiting those words in the most personal sort of way. That doesn’t mean that you read a poem and make it whatever you want it to be, but that it’s operating so deeply in you, that it is the most special kind of reading."

James A. Billington, the Librarian of the Congress, says of her, "Kay Ryan is a distinctive and original voice within the rich variety of contemporary American poetry. She writes easily understandable short poems on improbable subjects. Within her compact compositions there are many surprises in rhyme and rhythm and in sly wit pointing to subtle wisdom."

Ryan has written six books of poetry. Her books are: Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends (1983), Strangely Marked Metal (1985), Flamingo Watching (1994), Elephant Rocks (1996), Say Uncle (2000), Believe It or Not! (2002), and The Niagara River (2005). Her awards include the 2005 Gold Medal for Poetry from the San Francisco Commonwealth Club; the 2004 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from The Poetry Foundation; a 2004 Guggenheim Fellowship the same year; a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship as well as the 2001 Maurice English Poetry Award; the 2000 Union League Poetry Prize; and an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award in 1995. She has won four Pushcart Prizes and has been selected four different years for the annual volumes of the Best American Poetry. Since 2006, she has been a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.