Lilly Poetry Prize winner to read work

Kay Ryan, who was just named this year's winner of the prestigious Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, will join poet Atsuro Riley at 7:30 p.m. tonight in the Humanities Center to read from their work.

Ryan, the author of five collections of poetry, will be presented with the $100,000 Lilly Prize Thursday at the Arts Club in Chicago. Born in San Jose, Ryan grew up in the small towns of the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert. Since 1971 she has lived in Marin County. Her other awards include an Ingram Merrill Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Union League Poetry Prize and the Maurice English Poetry Award.

Her work has been selected twice for The Best American Poetry series and included in the anthology The Best of the Best American Poetry: 1988-1997. Her poems and essays also have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, The American Scholar, The Threepenny Review, The Yale Review, Parnassus and The Paris Review, among other journals.

Riley's work has appeared in The Threepenny Review and, most recently, in Poetry (March 2004). He was awarded a grant from the Artists Fund of the Peninsula Community Foundation in 2003.