Emily Dickinson Birthday Tribute: Kay Ryan (2012)

For the O.B. Hardison Poetry Series 2012 and in honor of Emily Dickinson, Pulitzer Prize winner Kay Ryan read on December 3, 2012 at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She read from her own work as well as Dickinson's. The following reception featured Dickinson's beloved black cake.

The reading was co-sponsored by The Poetry Association of America, whose director, Alice Quinn, introduced Ryan and moderated the conversation.

Kay Ryan

Kay Ryan’s voice maintains a detached yet insightful perspective in wry sometimes gleeful verse. Ryan is the author of several books of poetry, including Flamingo Watching, The Niagara River, and Say Uncle. Her book The Best of It: New and Selected Poems won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Ryan's other awards include 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 three Pushcart Prizes. Ryan was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2006. In 2008, she was appointed the Library of Congress' sixteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry.