Career Highlights

• One of her poems has been permanently installed at New York’s Central Park Zoo.
• Ryan was the Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2006.
• Her poems have been included in three Pushcart Prize anthologies.
• Ryan's awards include a 1995 award from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the 2000 Union League Poetry Prize, the 2001 Maurice English Poetry Award, a fellowship in 2001 from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2004 Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2004 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

Career Overview

Kay Ryan, the sixteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress received her bachelors and mater’s degree in English from the University of California, LA. Ryan’s first collection of poetry, Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends, was privately published in 1983 followed by a second collection titled Strangely Marked Metal in 1985. Her 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 others. Currently Kay Ryan is a part time English professor at the College of Marin in Kentfield and recently published a collection of poems titled The Jam Jar Lifeboat in 2008.

Kay Ryan speaks with Think Talk host Erika Thomas about how she got her career off the ground, and how she plans to leave her position as the United States Poet Laureate better than she left it. Ryan also offers advice to aspiring writers on what it takes to get a book published.