Kay Ryan

About Kay Ryan

Kay Ryan is an American poet and educator born in San Jose, California in 1945. She will be the sixteenth Poet Laureate of the United States. She grew up in California's San Joaquin Valley. She received both bachelor's and master's degrees from University of California, Los Angeles. Since 1971, she has lived in Marin County in California and has taught English at the College of Marin, Kentfield, California. Commencing with her first collection in 1983, by 2006 she had published 6 collections of poetry.

The Poetry Foundation's website 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." A review of her collection, Elephant Rocks, noted that "Her casual manner and nods to the wisdom tradition might endear her to fans of A.R. Ammons or link her distantly to Emily Dickinson. But her tight structures, odd rhymes and ethical judgments place her more firmly in the tradition of Marianne Moore and, latterly, Amy Clampitt."

Ryan's poems are often quite short. In one of the first essays on Ryan, Dana Gioia wrote about this aspect of her poetry. "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 – along with the emergence of other new masters of the short poem like Timothy Murphy and H.L. Hix and the veteran maestri like Ted Kooser and Dick Davis – signals a return to concision and intensity."