Kay Ryan was born in California
in 1945 and grew up in the small towns of the San Joaquin Valley
and the Mojave Desert. She received both a bachelor's and master's
degree from UCLA.
Ryan has published several
collections of poetry, including The
Niagara River (Grove Press, 2005); Say
Uncle (2000); Elephant
Rocks (1996); Flamingo
Watching (1994), which was a finalist for both the Lamont
Poetry Selection and the Lenore Marshall Prize; Strangely
Marked Metal (1985); and Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends
(1983). A re-issue of her 2002 collection, Believe It or
Not!, poems inspired by stories from the newspaper cartoon
Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, has recently been re-released
and re-titled as The
Jam Jar Lifeboat & Other Novelties Exposed,
(Red Berry Editions 2008). The Best of It: New and Selected
Poems will be published by Grove Press in spring 2010.
About her work, J.D. McClatchy
has said: "Her poems are compact, exhilarating, strange
affairs, like Erik Satie miniatures or Joseph Cornell boxes.
She is an anomaly in today's literary culture: as intense and
elliptical as Dickinson, as buoyant and rueful as Frost."
Ryan's awards include
the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, an Ingram
Merrill Award, a fellowship from the National Endowment for
the Arts, the Union League Poetry Prize, the Maurice English
Poetry Award, and four Pushcart Prizes. Her work has been selected
four times for The Best American Poetry and was included
in The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997.
Ryan's poems and essays
have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic,
Poetry, The Yale Review, Paris Review,
The American Scholar, The Threepenny Review, Parnassus,
among other journals and anthologies. She was named to the "It
List" by Entertainment Weekly and one of her poems
has been permanently installed at New York's Central Park Zoo.
Ryan was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets
in 2006. In 2008, Ryan was appointed the Library of Congress's
sixteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. Since 1971, she
has lived in Marin County in California.
