Interview with Kay Ryan by Neshama Franklin

Marin Poets Live! is a public access television monthly show presented by Marin County Free Library (http://www.marinlibrary.org/) and features host Neshama Franklin, who works at the Fairfax Branch Library. The show introduces local Marin poets and delves into their reasons for writing and the influence that living in Marin County has had on their poetry. In each interview, Neshama spends time eliciting background from each poet as well as offering her insights into the poems that each guest reads aloud. This interview with Kay Ryan aired Thursday, September 12, 2013 at 7:30pm. The monthly show appears the second Thursday of each month at 7:30pm PST. Check the Community Media Center of Marin for schedules (http://cmcm.tv/community-schedule). ---------------------------------------­----------------------------------------­------ Kay Ryan Biography Kay Ryan, United States Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner, was born in California in 1945 and grew up in the small towns of the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert. Since 1971, she has lived in Marin County in Northern California. About her work, J.D. McClatchy has said: "Her poems are compact, exhilarating, strange affairs, like Erik Satie miniatures or Joseph Cornell boxes. She is an anomaly in today's literary culture: as intense and elliptical as Dickinson, as buoyant and rueful as Frost."Ryan's 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 other journals and anthologies. Ryan was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2006. In 2008, Ryan was appointed the Library of Congress's sixteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. Her poems have been included in three Pushcart Prize anthologies (1997, 1998, 2004) and have been selected four times for The Best American Poetry (1999, 2005, 2006). In 2011 Ryan was listed as a finalist for the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award. Awards 2011 - MacArthur Foundation Fellows Program "Genius" Grant 2011 - Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 2004 - Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize 2004 - Guggenheim Fellowship 2001 - National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship 2001 - Maurice English Poetry Award 2000 - Union League Poetry Prize 1995 - Ingram Merrill Award 1988-1997 - The Best of the Best American Poetry Bibliography 2010 - The Best of It: New and Selected Poems 2008 - The Jam Jar Lifeboat & Other Novelties Exposed (re-release of Believe It or Not!) 2005 - The Niagara River 2002 - Believe It or Not! 2000 - Say Uncle 1996 - Elephant Rocks 1994 - Flamingo Watching 1985 - Strangely Marked Metal 1983 - Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends