Former U.S. Poet Laureate (2008-2010) Kay Ryan has received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for The Best of It: New and Selected Poems. And at virtually the same time as the Pulitzer announcment, the Concord Monitor and the New Hampshire Writers Project announced that she had received the $5,000 Hall-Kenyon Prize in American Poetry.

Ryan received her B.A. and M.A. degrees from UCLA, and has won numerous prizes and fellowships. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, The Yale Review, Paris Review, American Scholar, The Threepenny Review, Parnassus and many other publications and anthologies. One of her poems has been permanently installed at New York’s Central Park Zoo. She lives in Marin County, California.

The following poem is from her 2000 collection Say Uncle:

Patience

Patience is
wider than one
once envisioned,
with ribbons
of rivers
and distant
ranges and
tasks undertaken
and finished
with modest
relish by
natives in their
native dress.
Who would
have guessed
it possible
that waiting
is sustainable—
a place with
its own harvests.
Or that in
time’s fullness
the diamonds
of patience
couldn’t be
distinguished
from the genuine
in brilliance
or hardness.

Related:

Ryan’s profile page at poets.org.

Her profile page at the Poetry Foundation.

Ryan reads the poem “Home to Roost” (audio)/

Barbara Chai at the Wall Street Journal interviews Ryan on the Pultizer Prize.