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Kay Ryan
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U.S. Poet Laureate 2008-2010. Born in California in 1945, Kay Ryan 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 and has won 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. A four-time selection for The Best American Poetry, her poetry collections include The Best of It: New and Selected Poems, The Niagara River, Say Uncle, Elephant Rocks, Flamingo Watching, Strangely Marked Metal, and Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends.
In October 2009, Kay Ryan launched her project "Poetry for the Mind's Joy," an initiative through which she hopes to draw national attention to community colleges, as well as drawing the colleges' attention to poetry.