The Department of English will host a talk and poetry reading by Ryan, who was U.S. Poet Laureate from 2008-2010, in the Kate Buchanan Room on Thursday, March 26 from 7 to 9 p.m. The event is free and open to the public. A book sale and signing will follow, hosted by Arcata’s Northtown Books. Ryan’s talk is the spring installment of the department’s biannual Visiting Speaker series.
Professor Mary Ann Creadon, chair of the Department of English, attributes Ryan’s success to her innovative form. “She will rhyme in the middle of lines, or almost rhyme with similar sounds in the middle of lines, and that produces what she calls a kind of ‘luminescence’ in her poetry, so that words and meaning are made bright in a way that might not otherwise happen,” says Creadon.
Ryan’s approach imparts an accessibility to her work, says Creadon. “It makes her poems easy to read—at least at first. They are often very profound, but there is a real lightness in her style that makes her very readable and funny,” says Creadon.
Ryan, who was born in San Jose, Calif., has published several compilations of poetry. Her collection, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems, was nominated for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2011. She is currently working on a book of poetry titled Erratic Facts due in October. In addition to frequently publishing, Ryan taught remedial English for more than 30 years at the College of Marin in Kentfield, Calif. She holds both bachelor’s and master’s degrees from UCLA.
Ryan’s poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, The Yale Review, among other journals and anthologies. Ryan was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2006 and in 2008, Ryan was appointed the U.S. Library of Congress’s 16th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. She was also a Guggenheim Fellow and is a recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” grant.
This past fall the Department of English’s Visiting Writer Serires hosted Will Alexander, author of Goblin Secrets, which received the 2012 National Book Award winner for Young People’s Literature.