Kay Ryan

Poet

• Born: September 21, 1945
• Place of Birth: San Jose, California

Biography

In her own words, poet Kay Ryan grew up “living at the wrong edge / of the arable.” Born in 1945 in San Jose, California, to a working-class family (her father, Kay Richard Pederson, was an oil driller), Ryan was raised in the desert interior valley of southern California, where she graduated from Antelope Valley High School in 1963. After receiving two degrees in English from the University of California, Los Angeles (a BA in 1967 and an MA in 1968), Ryan briefly worked towards a PhD in literary criticism at the University of California, Davis, but she left before completing that degree. Like many of her contemporaries, Ryan has made a living as a college teacher, but unlike many of them she has taught not creative writing but basic composition at both the College of Marin and at San Quentin prison.

Ryan also differs from some of her contemporaries because she found her poetic vocation relatively late in life, as she relates in a 1998 essay titled “Do You Like It?” “In 1976, at the age of thirty, I was bicycling across the United States,” she wrote. “I had been feeling all the telltale symptoms of the poetic calling for a number of years, but was resisting it . . . the bicycle trip was four thousand miles to say yes or no to poetry.” She said “yes,” and self-published her first poetry volume, Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends (1983). The book was inspired and financed by the efforts of her spouse and colleague, Carol Adair (1942–2009). The poetry in that book and Ryan’s subsequent efforts have earned her praise for her ability to gracefully combine free verse and formalism into a spare but expressive style that has been compared with Emily Dickinson’s.

Ryan was in her fifties when she began to achieve national recognition, publishing poems in such influential outlets as the New Yorker. She has received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Ruth Lily Prize, the San Francisco Commonwealth Club Gold Medal for poetry, the Maurice English Poetry Prize, the Union League Poetry Prize, the Ingram-Merrill Award, and four Pushcart Prizes. Her poetry was included in the Best American Poetry anthologies for 1995 and 1999 and in Best of the Best American Poetry 1988–1997. She has served as a chancellor of the American Academy of Poets since 2006. In 2008 the US Library of Congress named her its Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, and she served two one-year terms. In 2011, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her 2010 collection, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems. She then released her next collection, Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose, in 2020.

In addition to The Best of It, Ryan has published several other volumes of poetry in the 2000s and 2010s. These include Say Uncle (2000); Believe It or Not! (2002); The Niagara River (2005); and Erratic Facts (2015).

Bibliography

“Biography: Kay Ryan.” Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, 2015. Web. 14 Apr. 2016.

Kirsch, Adam. “Think Small.” New Yorker. Condé Nast, 12 Apr. 2010. Web. 14 Apr. 2016.

Kost, Ryan. “In New Collection, Marin Poet Kay Ryan Contemplates Nuances of Loss.” San Francisco Chronicle. Hearst, 17 Oct. 2015. Web. 14 Apr. 2016.

“More about Kay Ryan.” Library of Congress. USA.gov, n.d. Web. 14 Apr. 2016.

Orr, David. "A Poet Traces her Personal Obsessions, in Prose." New York Times, 2 Oct. 2024, hwww.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/books/review/kay-ryan-synthesizing-gravity-selected-prose.html. Accessed 2 Oct. 2024.

Ryan, Kay. “Kay Ryan, The Art of Poetry No. 94.” Paris Review. Paris Review, Winter 2008. Web. 14 Apr. 2016.