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Columbus State Community College
(614) 287-2161

Poet Laureate Kay Ryan to keynote Columbus State Writers Conference April 18

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April 6, 2009
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 

U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan will come to Columbus April 18 to serve as the keynote speaker at Columbus State Community College’s sixth annual Writers Conference and Workshop.
 
The author of six acclaimed books of poetry, Ryan will present a reading of her work with commentary and a conversation with the audience. Her keynote address will begin at 1:15 p.m. in Columbus State’s downtown Workforce Development Center, 315 N. Cleveland Ave.
 
Ryan’s keynote address, free and open to the public, is being funded in part by the Huntington Lecture Series.
 
A very limited number of seats are also available for a private “Luncheon with the Laureate” at noon. Tickets to the luncheon are $25 ($15 for preregistered conference attendees).
 
The one-day Writers Conference—8 a.m.-5 p.m., also in the Workforce Development Center—will feature classes and workshops led by about 20 professional writers, including novelists, poets, journalists, screenwriters, children’s authors, literary agents, and more. The fee to attend the entire conference is $60 ($20 for students with a valid ID) and includes lunch and a light breakfast.
 
Registration for the conference is available online at www.cscc.edu/writersconference.
 
Kay Ryan’s poetry collections include The Niagara River (Grove Press, 2005); Say Uncle (2000); Elephant Rocks (1996); Flamingo Watching (1994), which was a finalist for both the Lamont Poetry Selection and the Lenore Marshall Prize; Strangely Marked Metal (1985); and Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends (1983). A re-issue of her 2002 collection, Believe It or Not!, poems inspired by stories from the newspaper cartoon Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, has recently been re-released and re-titled as The Jam Jar Lifeboat & Other Novelties Exposed, (Red Berry Editions 2008).
 
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 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 four Pushcart Prizes. Her work has been selected four times for The Best American Poetry and was included in The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997.
 
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. She was named to the “It List” by Entertainment Weekly, and one of her poems has been permanently installed at New York’s Central Park Zoo. 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.
 
Ryan was born in California in 1945 and grew up in the small towns of the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert. She received both a bachelor's and master's degree from UCLA. Since 1971, she has lived in Marin County in California.
 
For more information or to register for the conference, go to www.cscc.edu/writersconference or call Assistant Professor Deborah Bertsch, 287-5860, or Assistant Professor Judith Anderson, 287-5822.

2008 Columbus State Community College