Photo credit: Peter DaSilva for The New York Times
Kay Ryan, 62
Longtime BAP contributor Kay Ryan has been named the nation’s sixteenth poet laureate succeeding Charles Simic in the post.
Kay Ryan first appeared in the 1995 edition of Best American Poetry (ed. Richard Howard) with her poem "Outsider Art," which Harold Bloom selected for his Best of the Best (1998). You’ll also find her work in the 1999, 2005, and 2006 editions of BAP and in The Oxford Book of American Poetry. She writes with wit and brevity, has a flair for the epigrammatic, does not disdain a readership that values accessibility, and skillfully uses internal rhymes, often snapping a poem to closure with a rhyme that seems both surprising and, in retrospect, inevitable. Unconventionally, she uses modernist techniques to further her engagement with the public world. Kay Ryan lives in Marin County in California where she has taught the same course in remedial English at the local college for the last thirty years.
We posted her poem "That Will to Divest" on this blog on July 10th.
See Patricia Cohen’s piece in today’s Times, "Kay Ryan, Outsider with Sly Style, Named Poet Laureate."
— DL