Kay Ryan was born in California and has lived in Marin County, California, since 1971. She has received numerous awards for her poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, fellowships from both the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ingram Merrill Award. She has been a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets since 2006, and was the sixteenth United States Poet Laureate from 2008 to 2010. In 2011, Kay Ryan was awarded a $500,000 Fellowship by the MacArthur Foundation, in recognition of her exceptional poetry.









Praise for Kay Ryan:

You can’t help consuming Kay Ryan’s poems quickly, the way you are supposed to consume freshly made cocktails: while they are still smiling at you. But you immediately double back – what was that? – and their moral and intellectual bite blindsides you. - The New York Times

These are fine poems that inspire us with poetry’s greatest gifts: the music of language and the force of wisdom. - Annie Dillard

Kay Ryan works toward an exciting art, much less sparse than it looks. This is natural history seen from an angle of vision that Emerson and Dickinson would have approved. It refreshes me to find poems that require and reward rereading as much as these do. - Harold Bloom

Her poems are exhilarating, strange affairs, like Satie miniatures or Cornell boxes. […] Her sceptical imagination is pungent, her control masterful. - J.D. McClatchy, The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry